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Physicist Calculates Trajectory of Tiger At SF Zoo
KentuckyFC writes "Is it really possible for a 350-pound tiger to leap a 12.5-foot barrier from 33 feet away? (Said another way: a 159-kg tiger, a 3.8 m barrier, and 10 m away.) A physicist at Northeastern University has done the math, a straightforward problem in ballistics, and the answer turns out to be yes (abstract on the physics arXiv). But I guess we already knew that following the death of Carlos Souza at the paws of Tatiana, a Siberian Tiger he had allegedly been taunting at San Francisco zoo at the end of last year."
The tiger, obviously, disagreed with you. I submit that the tiger had better knowledge of the extent and degree of taunting that you do.
Sure, if I saw a guy taunting animals at the zoo I'd think he was a complete jerk. If it was really out of hand, I'd call security to arrest the guy.
It isn't as if this is a judicial sentence of death. What he deserved is irrelevant. You use that term when you are talking about justice not when you are talking about accidents with wildlife.But it's not something he deserved to die for.
It is a good habit not to blame the victim of a crime. But no real crime occurred here. He was just the victim of an accident that he caused. This should be repeated in every story discussing this event as a warning to any other stupid individual who thinks taunting tigers is harmless.
But it's a mitigating factor. The tiger didn't attack some random person, this guy was doing something to provoke the attack. That puts the attack in a different category. Both categories are bad in this case, but they are still different.
A well designed enclosure would have prevented this. The zoo is at fault. There is no question there.
However, the guy wasn't innocent. The tiger may not have attacked if he was behaving differently. There is a risk when you tease a 350lb killing machine. I see the fact he was doing that as important.
Your point is a bit like "sure he was kicking the dog, but that doesn't make it OK that the dog mauled him". Just because the result (mauling) was worse than the crime (kicking the dog) doesn't mean the crime is irrelevant.
Now teasing a tiger is not as bad as kicking a dog... the tiger isn't actually injured. The point is that the guy is not without blame.
If I had kids, I'd rather they heard this story with that fact, and would get the chance to learn the lesson "don't taunt things that can easily kill you, even if you think you're safe" than either never learn that lesson or learn it the hard way.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
35 mi/hr across the ground != 26 mi/hr at a 55 deg angle. I'd like to see how they propose converted that lateral velocity to the highly inclined one.
This is high school physics done badly. Very poor analysis.
I've been to tens of zoos hundreds of times, as I'm sure many of us have, and I always look at the tigers. They are almost always sleeping, or maybe moving to where the food is, eating it, and then sleeping. Once I saw one playing with a ball or a tree trunk and looking excited... and then it got its food that it was waiting for, ate it, and layed down to sleep again. In all of these situations the tigers seemed to care less that there people present, including typical zoo noise like kids "roaring" at the tigers. I shudder to think the amount of contact/irritation/etc. that would be necessary to have the following happen:
1) distract the cat from sleeping,
2) make it get up,
3) make it target you,
4) make it risk its own safety to jump out of its "den" to attack you,
5) make it actually attack, and
6) make it track you hundreds of feet past many other potential targets, now that it's free.
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Let's see. On an average day at the zoo, there are several thousand people who visit this enclosure. During all the years this enclosure has been around and has had a tiger of some sort in it, not one person has ever been attacked, let alone killed.
Then one day, after drinking and some drug use, these asshats decide to stand on a fence around the enclosure, yell and taunt at a wild animal which is known to be able kill humans, possibly shoot it with a slingshot, and yet somehow, despite the actions of supposedly the smartest animal on the planet, it's not the guy's fault he got himself killed?
But it's not something he deserved to die for.
It's called being responsible for your actions. Put another way, survival of the fittest in all its glory.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is an example of the tragedy of privatization.
How so? The fence is the same height today it was when it was a public zoo. The zoo was public when the fence was built. Seems a better case can be made that public zoos don't know how to design safe tiger enclosures.
"The tiger didn't go crazy, that tiger went tiger!" --Chris Rock
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This is unfortunately true. An animal that has actually overcome its instincts of avoidance (often due to unfortunate necessity) and killed a human becomes much more likely to do it again. There are no animals that, in the wild, are naturally mankillers, but there have been many documented instances of certain individuals becoming mankillers. Whatever the circumstances were and how unfair they were that provoked the first attack, once an individual animal has killed a man successfully, it becomes much more likely to do it again and again. Sadly, it's usually some stupid man who's turned the animal into a mankiller, but the fact remains that the animal now is a mankiller, and needs to be dealt with accordingly. I don't mourn for the idiot who provokes and gets killed in the first place, but one must deal realistically with the animal to prevent future innocent victims.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Actually, in this case it was SF police officers with .40 sidearms. I imagine that they were able to win only because there were so many rounds expended, as handgun rounds are hardly adequate for this sort of animal.
In any case, most folks believe that human life is more important than animal life, so when a police officer arrives to find a "rare" tiger mauling a "common" human, you can't be surprised when he opts to kill kill the freaking cat. The suggestion that the lives of a few humans should be willfully sacrificed to preserve the life of an animal flies against our built-in desire to preserve our race, so don't expect to be popular when you make it.