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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."
Someone should warn SF Zoo!
which is totally what she said
Surely someone would have calculated how far away a tiger needed to be from the public? Or doesn't anyone know how far a tiger can leap at SF zoo?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's just nice to see that the zoo's kharma system was working. Unfortunately, someone meta-modded the tiger with a shotgun.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Never taunt someone call Tatyana or god forbid Katusha... If you value your life that is...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
After all, it's exactly the type of thing you should think about about when you design enclosures for dangerous animals. My family all seem to think that because this guy was taunting the tiger, the zoo is relieved of its liability. I think that's ridiculous--even if he was being stupid, you go to the zoo with a reasonable expectation that the animals can't get at you, and that means thinking hard about how high they can jump, not just building the wall up until you guess there's no way a tiger's jumping out of there.
So 26.7mph is fine - great, but I'd like to see a tiger run at 26.7mph uphill (at 55 degrees!). That would be vastly more impressive than 35mph on the flat.
Were William Blake's original calculations performed using the higher heating value? Was incomplete combustion taken into account? Unless it was pulverized tiger, which the "symmetry" remark seems to argue against, LOI must be taken into account for any reasonable assumption of the tiger's luminous characteristics.
All prior researchers have not returned from the jungle. Information is incomplete.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, I guess this is enough for the lawsuits to start flying at the zoo. Surely there are enough lawyers out there that will take the case. "Your honor, the zoo was clearly negligent in designing a tiger cage that a tiger could jump out of. The fact that the victim was allegedly taunting the tiger does not factor into the fact that the tiger was able to escape due to the mistake of the zoo building the environment."
Which begs the question; What kind of methods are used to determine the 'standards' for an inclosure?
The repeated mentioning of this guy taunting the animal irritates me, because it seems to imply it was his fault.
Yeah, climbing over the fence to deliberately provoke a large predator and whatnot... totally the zoo's fault.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I did a similar calculation a while ago.
An object of 750kg can accelerate to 60km/h in 5 impulses (rapid pushes).
How far will an object of 75kg travel when one such impulse is applied at angle of 45 degrees upward?
The 750kg object is a horse. About 5 pushes of hind hooves are enough to reach the full speed.
The 75kg object is a human kicked by the horse (remaining motionless with a counter-push of front hooves).
The result was something like 30 meters. The damage was equivalent to fall from 6th floor.
And they tell us horses can't say "no" when they don't want sex.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
If we already know the answer, then the question really is, can we explain how a 350-pound tiger to leap a 12.5-foot barrier from 33 feet away, or do we need to do some more research?
http://outcampaign.org/
I've been to the zoo dozens of times and have never been mauled by any animals. I'm not saying he deserved to die, but maybe he should have stuck to taunting the turtles.
Looking at this diagram: http://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2008/01/03/mn_grotto.jpg You can see that it is 33ft along and 2.5ft up for starters. (12ft is from the bottom of the moat, not from where the tiger jumped).
Then the tiger's centre of mass is probably about 2.5ft up anyway so it more about being able to jump 33ft flat.
Also speed doesn't translate into distance in this simplistic way either: if it did humans would be almost able to jump the distance (max speed = 26.25mph) which is close as damm it to the 26.7mph required.
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The numbers don't tell the entire story. Just because something can go 27mph doesn't mean it can necessarily project itself over the fence at a given projectory. The worlds fastest humans can go 27mph, but I'll put money against their ability to jump over a 12.5' fence; the world high jump record is 8'. Tigers and people are built differently for sure, but I'm not sure how the math applied in this document applies to animals when so many other factors are at play.
The repeated mentioning of this guy taunting the animal irritates me, because it seems to imply it was his fault.
I'm sure some misguided folks think he did deserve to die. However, the details of the taunting points to the possibility of the tiger's performance having been aided by adrenaline. The fellow wasn't just a helpless bystander when a tiger suddenly realized that she could escape her enclosure.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
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.
"Och, someone save me from the wee turtles! They were too fast for me!"
Blank until
before I finally decide.
Since I heard this story I have kept believing that it was some drunken college kid throwing french-fries at the Panthera tigris and subsequently losing the rest of his fries when disemboweled. I think my original quote was "Hey! Let's see what will happen when I throw a french-fry at a tiger! Make sure to put it on YouTube!"
I thought the tiger flew.
Quantum Physicist Calculates Trajectory of Tiger At SF Zoo
Really, just stick the damn tiger in a box.
Two hunters are in the jungle and they see a tiger coming towards them at the other side of a clearing. Fred raises his rifle, and pulls the trigger. It misfires. Then Bill's gun jams. The tiger is steadily approaching, licking its lips. Fred suddenly takes off his pack and starts limbering up. "What are you doing," says Bill, "you'll never outrun a tiger."
"True - but I only need to outrun you!" replies Fred.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wanna bet the tiger would still be in its cage if these drunken idiots had decided NOT to shoot it with a slingshot? The only tragedy here was the tiger having to be killed.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Was the fact that people left all sorts of candles, flowers, etc for the tiger that attacked the boy and was killed. Virtually nothing was left for the mauling victim.
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.
If you assume the tiger travels at 35 miles/hour, and you solve their equations for the height of the obstacle given that speed, you find that the height of the obstacle would need to be at least 34.5 feet
An African or European tiger?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I agree. Being a jerk for a few minutes to a tiger doesn't mean you should die.
I don't think it's mostly about "jerks deserve to die" though. I think most of the reason people like to keep repeating it is it gives them a comforting thought that the world is under their control, and safe. We're safe from tigers as long as WE don't taunt them. This guy was the cause of the problem, so there's no real need to worry about tigers escaping from cages (ignoring the other two people who were mauled of course).
Of course, the cage wasn't tall enough, and the Zoo is obviously responsible for this mans death. I'll ignore the whole argument if we should have Zoos for Tigers in the first place.
AccountKiller
Neither were the other two. The tiger didn't jump 33 feet either; it climbed the side of the wall and pulled herself over. Thank you for playing, though.
I wouldn't mess with the turtles if I were you. While the tiger's retribution may be swift and deadly, the turtle is content to bide his time, and has a much colder, darker heart. Once you get on a turtle's bad side, your life will never be the same. The turtle will make the rest of your long life a living hell. A turtle is cold and evil, and he never forgets.
I cannot be bothered with this metric stuff! Use units I can relate to!
How high was the fence measured in Libraries of Congress?
Also, taunting a tiger is a lot different than taunting a shrew, a turtle, or any other animal at the zoo. Those other ones don't have a reputation as man-eaters. Who's to say that a tiger couldn't get out of pretty much any enclosure, given that it felt pissed off enough? the 12-footx30-foot distance is supposed to remind you that this cat means business.
Taunting a tiger is a bit like running down the street screaming the N word in Harlem: there are much, much safer ways to be a jackass.
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Wasn't it? If you annoy a domestic cat, you're going to get scratched or bitten. How hard it is to deduce that if annoying a little cat will get you hurt, then annoying a big cat is likely to get you killed? There is a reason that many zoos have signings warning people not to tease the animals. The reason is simple: humans are fragile, and easily hurt by angry animals.
The guy pissed off the tiger, and paid for it with his life. If he hadn't been so careless, he'd still be alive. Frankly, he should be put into the running for a Darwin Award.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I've been to the zoo dozens of times and have never been mauled by any animals.
You are not going to the right zoos then.....
Monstar L
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I took engineering physics in college, and from what I recall all formulas only worked on massless, frictionless systems and didn't account for air resistance. Now, how the hell did a physicist crunch these numbers?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The authors formulate a high school physics problem, good, for example for an olimpic competition. Nothing wrong with that, it proves thast something can be done with high school knowledge. However I expected more from a professional paper, which should go further. The tiger is not a material point, but a body with a variable geometry. A more detailed biomechanical description shoud be used, in order to describe the way the jump is initiated, etc. Nevertheless the elementary, high school style analysis of the authors is a good starting point.
However, in its present form the paper is not publishable in a scientific journal, much more should be done.
Hey, let's not forget the ninja skills he picked up from the park rat.
Star Pirates
Except, apparently, the Zoo knew that the 12 foot wall was four feet short of recommended guidelines for containing a healthy man-eating tiger in the presence of the general public. Also, the Zoo should quite rationally be fully aware that in any sample of the general public, there will be jackasses who would like to taunt said cats, and also vulnerable people who are completely innocent nearby, should the tiger still be hungry after eating said jackass.
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http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=117&articleID=1515
"There are more tigers in the United States--as many as 10,000--than in the wilds of Asia. Held in public zoos and private hands, these captive cats are so genetically degraded through rampant cross-breeding that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated them a virtually new, ninth subspecies: the "generic captive tiger."
I find it very hard to sympathise with any human being killed by a Tiger outside of it's natural territory. They will be extinct in our lifetime.
He didn't deserve it, but asked for it.
Nobody deserves to die but when they do things that are incredibly stupid like shooting at a tiger with a slingshot and climbing over the fence that holds the tiger in.... well, this stuff tends to happen.
People die all the time doing things they should not have been doing. Base jumping off tall buildings, walking on train tracks, driving while drunk, robbing banks... you can argue that all of these aren't enough to deserve death but who is at fault? The architects who designed the building, the city planners who put in the train line, the car manufacturers who designed the car, the legal system that outlawed stealing other people's money????
The guy put himself and others in danger by provoking a dangerous animal and providing it the opportunity to escape and run amok.... did you know the tiger actually climbed up the guy who was hanging over the fence in order to get out of the enclosure? It would have been much more difficult for it to escape if he hadn't been hanging over the fence (maybe impossible) providing a convenient ladder of sorts...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I nominate this guy for a Darwin Award (or second it if someone has already).
Sure he didn't deserve to die, and I feel for the family of the guy killed. However I agree with your analogy, he didn't think through the whole pissing off a tiger idea. My cats, about a 10th or less of the size of a tiger can jump almost half that hight should the need arise, I would expect a tiger to be able to make a similar feat.
The Zoo is equally is also to blame, should the guy have not taunted it, it would obviously still have been possible to jump that.
Um, yes. He did. Just the same as anyone else, he knew how do behave. He taunted something that was captive and learned quick that he didn't have the balls to back up his mouth. If this would happen more often, natural selection instead of pansy apologism, the world would be a much better place.
He pissed off a tiger for crying out loud, and that's a mistake you should be able only make once.
The repeated mentioning of this guy taunting the animal irritates me, because it seems to imply it was his fault.
Maybe this would qualify him for a Darwin Award.
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.
But it's not something he deserved to die for.
Taunting any large animal, especially a predator, is a very silly thing to do. Serious injury or death can result even if the animal in question is not usually agressive towards humans.
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
The math is correct, but the physics is wrong. The paper makes the assumption that running 35 mph horizontally is easily translatable to 27 mph at a steep (55 degree) angle. A tiger is not an elastic body that can bounce off a rock at any angle without energy (velocity) loss. For the math to apply as it is written, it would have to assume that the tiger accelerated from 0 to 27 mph on a 10 yard long ramp elevated at 55 degrees. That is NOT what happened. I am not saying that the tiger couldn't leap out of the enclosure, I am just saying that the paper does NOT prove this. Don't be swayed with lots of pretty numbers and formulae, use common sense to do a sanity check.
I don't know whether or not those boys taunted the tiger, and honestly, I'm not sure it would have made a difference. But I'm fairly certain the tiger would not have "settled down" after only killing a couple of people, not when the place was filled with fearful, slow two-legged animals acting like "prey". Welcome to the world of wild animals.
blue
I believe the thing that bothers most people, why they seem to imply that the guy got what was coming to him, is that the animal was behind bars and the guys were torturing it verbally and possibly with a slingshot [begin slingshot debate now]. Would the guy have done the same thing to a large breed dog he saw walking down the street? Probably not. But some vodka and an animal enclosure turns the guys into George of the Jungle.
When push comes to shove do most people think the guy really deserved death? No. But we're far enough removed from it to think about it like something we'd watch on TV instead of something that might happen to someone we know.
Strange side note:
The following is from a major news outlet regarding what the police did when they arrived on the scene only to find the tiger loose:
Nice work. I understand it's not something you deal with at the academy, but do you really think yelling "Stop" is going to have a major impact on the behavior of the tiger?
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
All she wanted was peace and quiet for her all-day nap. Did she deserve to die for that?
Coming up next on Mythbusters :-).
This is an example of the tragedy of privatization. The SF used to be a public zoo. It also used to be a good zoo. Then it was privatized, and the company cut costs and corners. In the 90s, zookeepers were caught stealing branches off of people's eucalyptus trees because there was no budget for koala food. It would not surprise me to learn that the zoo's management knew all about the potential problem and refused to do anything based on cost.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You're mixing emotion and fact here. No one "deserves" to die, that's an emotional stance. Taunting a tiger, an animal locked in a tiny cage for all its life, results in death. That is a fact. Leave the tigers alone, better yet, leave them in their natural habitat, and let nature sort out who should die when taunting an animal with 1)denser and stronger muscle fiber, 2)is larger than you.
Drunk kids should die more often, IMO. Either from tigers or BMW M5s. Keeps the gene pool cleaner.
The repeated attempts to shift the blame away from the taunter irritate me, because it seems to imply it was anyone else but the guy's fault.
The zoo designed the enclosure to contain animals who are not enraged. A lapse of judgment, but not sufficient to implicate them in the guy's death.
The guy caused the death of not just himself but one of about 1000 individuals of a critically endangered species that we have a duty to protect. I submit that he fully deserved the result of his actions.
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Now jump that fence or I shall taunt you a second time.
I once had a guided-tour through a German zoo. When we came to the tigers the guide told us that the tigers in theory were able to leap over the barriers. According to the guide many animals in that zoo were able to escape when they really wanted. However, animals are similar to most people in some aspects. Life is good in the zoo and within the known areas. What is outside is unknown, perhaps scary, so why bother? Looks like the taunting was enough reason to bother for that tiger.
A well designed enclosure would have prevented this. The zoo is at fault. There is no question there.
What kind of enclosure would you actually need to keep an enranged and adrenaline fueled tiger in though.
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.
The way all mammals respond to threats is known as "flight or flight". Predators are likely to tend towards the former. There are few things an adult tiger will run from.
I contend that the enclosure was just fine. The tiger was content until he was taunted. This story had less to do with "how to contain a tiger" than "don't taunt the potentially man-eating tiger!" Note, he only went after those who taunted him! I'm not saying it was justified, but given that the tiger could hardly go to the authorities and his predisposition to violence he did what a tiger does back home.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
So obviously we should have the zoo put up a sign that says "PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE TIGER".
I am officially gone from
"Okay, first let's make sure he's really dead."
"Okay."
(silence, then a gunshot)
"Okay." (pause) "Should I double-check the tiger, too?"
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
For one, they didn't climb over the fence, they were standing on top of the fence. Two, the fence was 3' high-- the kind you have to prevent 3 year olds from falling into the moat, not to prevent the tiger from getting out.
For doing something really stupid (irritating a tiger) and getting killed, hence removing his DNA from the human gene pool...
Yes it is. Fuck that sick little shit, he absolutely deserved to die. Just ask yourself what kind of horrible mind it takes to enjoy teasing an animal that we've already put in a cage. Just how would you feel if somebody stuck you in a jail cell for your whole life, for no reason at all as far as you know, and then started flinging shit at you? Oh, and don't forget, you're 350-pounds of concentrated kinetic death.
I for one am glad that that fuckhead's cruelty is gone. The absolute foolishness and lack of respect that are also gone is just icing. Provided they weren't participating, the true tragedy is the two others that got mauled because of that dumb shit kid and the foolish zoo, and of course the tiger that had to be killed.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Grantecd, but I think it's directed more at the people who say "You taunt a tiger, you deserve to get mauled."
Personally, I agree, yes this dude was stupid. However, the zoo is very much at fault here-- while I don't know the extent of the taunting that was going on, if a tiger can get enraged enough to jump the fence for three guys, what happens if it's a rambunctious field trip full of 6 year olds? Do taunting children "deserve" to be mauled too? And more importantly (since I don't care about a bunch of 6 year olds, but think-of-the-children is always a great argument point), do the rest of this zoo's "safety" measures come up to code, or are they lacking elsewhere? Are we going to be getting news that a shark rammed it's way through an aquarium window when someone starting humming the Jaws theme and tapping on the glass?
it's not something he deserved to die for
I don't know about that. That's a very late post-modern (I might even say emasculated) way of looking at it. 1000 years ago, hell even 100 years ago, that kind of jackassery would definitely get you killed in a real hurry, and probably a number of other people as well. Getting roasted and shooting tigers with slingshots recklessly endangers himself and others, and those are not qualities you want in your village. I would bet virtually everyone would have shrugged and said "Glad he didn't take anyone with him when he went."
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Assuming you mean "what difference does it make", it makes quite a lot of difference. Now somebody stupid enough to taunt an animal that can eat him won't reproduce. It's called "evolution in action". I just wish they hadn't killed the tiger. It didn't do anything wrong.
Here's proof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwQ4hDsP_jg
I am sure that the taunting and teasing the gentlemen did was ample motivation for the tiger.
The asian elephant in this is about 12' tall. Back story: A tiger escaped from a preserve in India (Kaziranga National Park) and had killed a couple of farm animals. She was training her cubs to hunt. Rangers had found the cubs and took them (which I find incredibly stupid because now she's stressed and looking for them). Riding elephants, they found the female in the brush and tried to tranquilize her, but the dart missed. What happened next should give you and idea what the jerks in the SF zoo saw.
The elephant trainer survived, but was badly wounded.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
ok, a tiger on solid ground could clear that fence, but what about a tiger with wings and a propeller on a treadmill?
More tigers = fewer jackasses.
I don't see the problem.
If you put your head in the lions mouth please expect it to bite your head off. If you enrage a tiger please expect it to come after you. Totally the guys fault he is dead.
Yeah because drinking underage obviously implies your parents didn't do their job. Whatever. I agree, they should know better than taunting anyone or anything but don't try to make it like their parents were awful parents because the kids were drinking.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
ok, tagging is beta, but shouldn't this one be tagged as "ignobel" instead of "darwinawards" ?
What kind of enclosure would you actually need to keep an enranged and adrenaline fueled tiger in though.
;)
One that is several feet taller than this one was would have done it. Adrenaline isn't magic, and its performance boost is finite. It obeys the laws of physics like everything else.
The fact that the tiger was enraged doesn't mean that no cage could have held her. The sort of unlimited rage bonus your question seems to imply only comes into play if the tiger has been exposed to gamma rays.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Heh.
I actually agree that there is no equivalence, but I would put the tiger at the higher value.
Humans are dirt cheap to produce, we have more then we know what to do with already and could easily survive a 90% population drop.
Tigers are pretty rare and are relatively close to a 'point of no return' population drop.
Seems kind of redundant to run those calculations. I'm curious if someone's done those calculations on the recommended height & distance. It would be more noteworthy if a tiger was capable of jumping that.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
People taunt tigers in zoos every single day in this country; in fact, the very idea of enclosing a tiger and encircling it with gawking, slow-moving humans seems like a taunt to me. Yet how many people are attacked by tigers at zoos in the United States? It's extraordinarily rare. I don't condone tiger taunting, but as far as sins go, it's venial. Somewhat OT, but I think the "darwinawards" tag is tasteless, and, for me, is yet another piece of evidence against this stupid tagging system.
Ahm, because in _PART_ it was his fault?
This is the type of situation the darwin awards were developed for. Doing something stupid and dangerous will occasionally get you killed. Yes it is tragic and things could have been done to prevent the situation, but ultmiatly the guy and his friend's poor behavior led to the actual events. Crow, if the other two had not been drinking the zoo staff might have actually believed their drunk panicked ramblings and they wouldn't have gotten mauled... but again, they made some stupid decisions and it cost them.
Deserved to die? No. But does death change the fact he had a hand in his own fate here? No again.
Turtles never forget. Turtles never forgive. Expect them.
Next, they leapt for the lame and wounded; I feared not for I was not hurt.
Next, they leapt for the young and tender; I feared not...
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No, he did not deserve to die. This was an accident waiting to happen, and it's unfortunate that the take away message people have is "Welp, I guess you shouldn't yell at deadly animals" when it should be "Jesus, that zoo endangered all of its patrons by making the wall too low".
We already know that the zoo was cutting corners. We already know that this isn't the first time that this tiger mauled somebody, thus lowering it's fear of humans. What if the zoo accidentally skipped one of the tigers feedings? Would the next person to get mailed be at fault for being too slow?
No, there are no factors that mitigate the zoo's fault in this. Under no circumstances should a tiger be able to jump out of its cage. I'm surprised that I even have to explain this to people.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. Inspectors from the AAZA (American Association of Zoos and Aquariums) were out two years ago and measured the walls of the enclosure, calling them adequate according to their standards. And they're the ones who write the book on these matters.
Still, it's a damned shame. For the tiger, that is. Not for the drunken nimrod who was teasing her, going so far as to pass the barriers erected to keep the public back from the animals, according to the evidence found at the scene.
This enclosure was built in the thirties. It was just as dangerous during the ~60 years that it was a public zoo, as it was the last ~15 years as a private zoo. The Association of Zoos & Aquariums, which sets standards for zoo design, first started it's formal accreditation program in 1974. So they should have been aware of the problem for a good 20 years before it was privatized.
There does appear to be problems with the way the SF zoo is being operated now, but this particular case is a long standing condition that neither the public caretakers, private owners, nor the AZA made any effort to fix.
I dunno, if you stick your tongue in an electrical outlet, you deserve to get shocked. If you walk across a highway blindfolded, you deserve to get hit. If you taunt a tiger, you deserve to get mauled. If he didn't want to get mauled to death, he could have easily left the tiger alone.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Assume a spherical tiger in a vacuum...
If you are stupid enough to not realize that climbing over the 3' fence to get closer than you are supposed to to the tiger, and then taunting the tiger, while intoxicated, is a bad idea, then I hope something takes your DNA out of the gene pool. Darwinism at work here people! I mean honestly, trying to make a tiger made is NEVER a good idea. Guess they never heard the expression about not pulling on the tiger's tail.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I checked the paper. It is overly simplified on many accounts. First of all, no respected physicist would ever use Imperial Measurement System (foot, mile, etc) in physics calculations. (I have no rational explanation of American fascination with outdated and illogical units.) Secondly and more importantly: a tiger is not a point-like-particle and its movement cannot be adequately described in the way used in the article.
Some of the kinetic energy during its jump is transferred into rotation, movement of his body parts, etc. Unless all these complex interactions are properly accounted for, the problem is not solved. It is quite plausible, that the SF tiger did clear the fence but this paper's proof leaves a lot to be desired.
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It's quite possible that this isn't the first time the tiger has "made it out". It may already have jumped over the fence, knew its capabilities, and then quietly went back into it's enclosure. All to the detriment of the drunken young men :-P
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
"trying to make a tiger mad" not made. my bad.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I don't think this is a fault of privatization but of the company that took over this zoo. What good did it do them to cut corners? Now people are afraid to go to the zoo and the company will lose money and maybe go out of business. It doesn't help to cut corners in the long run and good businesses know that. The free market reacts to business in this way and thus regulates it.
But I do agree that lots of private companies don't care enough since they are driven entirely by profit and don't think about safety as much as they should until it's too late.
I'm not sure I agree; I think if people were always killed for being a jerk then we wouldn't have any jerks around. It would be a hell of an inducement to civil behavior. Seeing as how civil behavior is extremely lacking these days - maybe we should have "death to jerks"...
Oh come on, just about everybody has done something really boneheaded at least once in their life. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are probably rare.
As a teen I once went snow-mobilling with a ditzy broad. When it was her turn to drive (we shared one mobile together), she was a complete maniac, blindly jumping wide creeks and all kinds of foolish stuff. One head told me to go the hell home, but the *other* head was hypnotized by beauty.
Table-ized A.I.
A funny cartoon on this subject, with a point to ponder about the way it was handled by the media and the officials there: ahref=http://fridayreflections.typepad.com/weblog/2008/01/tiger-escapes-a.htmlrel=url2html-14940http://fridayreflections.typepad.com/weblog/2008/01/tiger-escapes-a.html>
He wasn't put to death by us, he was put to death by the already imprisoned creature that he was torturing. Humans (are supposed to) have a higher moral standard. They're supposed to be able to judge that an action or reaction is out of line. A tiger cannot be expected to make this distinction. He also wasn't just verbally taunting, they were using a slingshot on it. Big difference.
I'm not bothered by callousness, nor was I implying that I was, so there's no irony. I'm bothered by cruelty, which is what he displayed. I feel schadenfrauede when an idiot gets what's coming to them.
There's no need to patronize, I realize that a tiger shouldn't be able to jump out of its cage, and I agree, 100% of the blame for this is on the zoo's shoulders. It doesn't matter whose fault it was though, the kid deserved what he got.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
here will be jackasses who would like to taunt said cats
There you have hit the nail on the head. It's a cat. If you wind up a cat, you will get bitten. If you wind up a cat that's big enough to actually eat you, you will get eaten.
Anyone who has seen a a regular cat (1-2ft with tail, 10-15lb) jump up a 5-6ft wall should realize that a 10ft tiger weighing 350lb certainly has a fighting chance of jumping up a 12ft wall. In fact I'm sure they can do much more than than. If it can clean the thing ballistically as this story notes, then one can only imagine what they can do by "running up the wall" normal cat-style, using their paw-pads to grip the wall and gain additional upward momentum through muscle power.
Only in America would someone whine "but no-one told me it was unsafe to be stupid, boo-hoo".
These morons got precisely what they might expect to have coming to them, regardless of whether the zoo should have built a higher wall. The only real tragedy is that the innocent tiger - en endangered species - was killed.
The man's actions should definitely come in to play, fairly or not.
Does someone that doesn't look both ways before crossing the street deserve to get hit by a car? Does a person that doesn't wear a seat belt deserve to smash through windshield if they get into a car accident? It's not so much about deserving or not, but about risk assessment, and it turns out the guy was pretty bad at assessing the risk to which he was subjecting himself.
Typical nanny state attitude. Make everything super safe, regardless how it is used. Please remove all power sockets from your home. Some idiot might stick its tongue into it.
You're logic needs a bit of help.
Here A --> B. Tiger Taunting --> Mauling by Tiger
Not A does not necessarily mean Not B.
People aren't saying "ahhhh my life is safe, I don't taunt tigers". They're saying: "if you DO taunt tigers, bad things are likely to happen". There's a clear difference between the two.
I'd recommend an interesting book: Life of Pi by Yann Martel. It goes into a good amount of detail about zoo related issues and especially tigers. We're not safe from tigers at all. Yes, there IS a certain level of risk going to a zoo.
I take issue with your thought that these people constantly repeating the fact of the taunting are doing such out of some idea of a sense of security or a world under control. Indeed, I see the reverse. It appears to me that you may be arguing for a safe world where folk should be safe to taunt tigers.
As several others have mentioned, this isn't an issue of sentencing (or wishing) the young chap to death for stupidity. It's a horrific reminder WHY such stuff is stupid. It's not stupid behavior because it's boorish and disturbs our sense of peace. It's stupid behavior because it could quite easily to lead to a premature death. And to GP's post, this ought to show you that the proper response may not be so much to call security to get the man arrested as much as to hastily move away.
Yes the zoo (and related agencies) are clearly at fault for the wall height. Punitive damages against the zoo should be stark to shock the cobwebs out of the eyes and brains of zoos and agencies to address things like this properly.
But in order to be able to proceed through life in a prudent manner, it seems important to have a reasonable understanding of dangers. Many animals are incredibly dangerous for one reason or another. This is not something people should take lightly. Discussing this particular occurance devoid of the context (the taunting) would seem to be enormously unwise. It could lead to all sorts of erroneous conclusions.
Actually, I would argue that teasing this tiger was, in the end, worse than merely teasing an animal. His actions did result in it's death; A destruction of an endangered species.
Everything else, I can agree with you on.
Star Pirates
Um... it had to die because it was loose and could have attacked anybody. The cops arrived on the scene, and put the animal down to protect themselves and others. The law of the jungle: kill or be killed.
I guess it boils down to a question of what is being mitigated. We agree that the zoo was at fault. Also, everyone probably agrees that the tiger was blameless, and exhibiting normal, expected tiger behavior.
What people feels it mitigates is not any sort of legal liability. What it mitigates is our own personal sense of injustice in the situation. There's a certain wink and nod "aren't you glad this asshole died?". There are plenty of examples in this thread of people saying just that without the wink and the nod, and the constant reference to taunting certainly encourages that.
The question we should be asking ourselves is whether we are happy that someone who taunted a tiger died. If we are, we ought be be asking why.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Maybe you had the urge to taunt dangerous animals but I never did. If you feel like killing something then go hunting. I nominate the guy who died for a Darwin Award. Its a tiger, anything smaller and less powerful than it is food.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
If you look at the link the parent posted ( http://www.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2008/01/03/mn_grotto.jpg ) you can clearly see that the situation shown in the picture is vastly different from what the calculations looked at. Based on what is shown in the picture this was essentially a running long jump for the tiger. There was virtually no elevation involved, especially when you consider that she could easily pull herself up over the top if she was a couple of feet short. That diagram is very enlightening.
Wouldn't "Crunching Physicist, Hidden Trajectory" have been a more fitting title? :p
Carbon based humanoid in training.
This isn't about justice, crime or punishment, it's about doing something incredibly stupid that will get you killed.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Clearing a 12.5 ft barrier at 33 ft away just didn't feel intuitively possible, so I found a projectile physics toy to test it:
Projectile Motion
In SI, the values are 12 m/s at an angle of 55 degrees with a mass of 160 kg, clearing a 3.8 m barrier at 10 m away.
I had some recollection that 45 degrees was the optimum launch angle, but apparently that maximizes distance, not height. Mass doesn't factor into the calculations unless you include air resistance, which the paper neglects.
The surprisingly sensitive factor is launch velocity. Lose 1 m/s and you smack into the middle of the wall. Gain 1 m/s and clear a 16 ft barrier, landing 52 ft away. It still seems phenomenal to actually get a tiger's horizontal velocity redirected at 55 degrees.
Depends upon how hard you throw it!
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
It did have an impact on the tigers behaviour, it made it aware of some new tasty targets for it to chew on. Unfortunately for the tiger these targets did something that it wasn't quite expecting.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Well, we are in the realm of a the speculative here, since we are talking about things that might have happened if things were contrary to how they actually are.
However the current management of the zoo has everything to do with the height of the wall, even though the wall was built before the management took charge, because the wall was built before safety standards were established.
If the safety standards were established after the current management took charge, the older management was to blame; if it took place after the current management took charge, then both the current management and the old management are to blame, because the incoming management should have checked everything before taking over. One way or the other, the current management is "at fault" here. The old management might not have been at fault, if it were not known that tigers could clear such a wall at the time.
In any case, this is not really a valid test case for privatization, because the zoo is run as a partnership between the SF Parks department and the non-profit SF Zoological Society. It is the difference between non-profit and for-profit here that is critical, not the difference between government and private.
A well run non-profit should make the decision to evaluate the safety of its exhibits and address any problems in exactly the same way a well run government institution would. Either should determine whether the exhibits meet standards of safety and either correct any deficiencies, or close the exhibit. A well run for-profit would look at the decision in a risk/benefit context.
In fact, a well run for-profit takes these uncertainties and makes them quantifiable by buying insurance. If the insurance company misses the problem with the tiger enclosure, that's all to the good: the company gets a windfall savings. If the insurance company catches the problem, then you've got a simple NPV calculation between the investment and the premium differential. Either way, you plug the numbers into a spreadsheet, and if the spreadsheet says you go on with an unsafe exhibit, you do.
So, net net net, as they say, you can't conclude anything about the difference between private and public management by this event. You can conclude something about this management, which is that in this case at least it didn't do its job. If this were a private, for profit company they might well have been managing "properly", by concluding the wall was "probably" safe, and the cost of fixing the situation was higher than the probable benefit.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Agreed. Society has fattened us all up to the point where we rely on laws to keep us safe. This is a case where some dumb individual was punished for being dumb; There isn't any sort of clause in nature that states the punishment should fit the crime.
Piss tiger off, get eaten. Done and done.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
I think I'd just about give a week's pay to see the expression change on the taunter's face the very moment he realized that the fence was an insufficient barrier.
Table-ized A.I.
Are you kidding me?
Depending on the taunting that went on, this guy's age and whether he had children already he could be in line for a really great darwin award!
Liberty.
Deserves got nothing to do with it,
He made some assumptions that happen to be incorrect. He assumed that the Tiger couldn't get out of it's cage, he was wrong. As soon as he began taunting the tiger with a slingshot he became complicit in his own death.
He also must have missed the episode of Dirty Jobs where they were feeding the tigers at the SF zoo, and it was quoted by the zookeeper,
"The tigers we have here are the most aggressive in the world."
That information would have been useful prior to the taunting of said tiger.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Only taunt those who are weaker and less aggressive than you.
I worked at a zoo in Chicago, and the Siberian Tigers were a concern. The distance between the habitat and the rest of us, seemed fine, would probably stand up to calculations, but never quite seemed enough for an animal bent on escape. When the things arrived at the zoo, I was photographing them, and the shear power of the roar was simply amazing. Standing outside of a steel box with the things in them didn't diminish the fact that they were there.
One night I was watching some European wolves pace around there cage, when one caught my eye. Eye contact bad! It walked slowly down the exhibit and launched at the wall hitting the top. I left quickly... The Mexican wolves were rumored to escape often.
People want to see the animals, and like everything else in this world it is a balance of risks. It's bad enough that the animals appear so sedate, but compound that with a realistic safe distance, and it would be a recipe for disaster. There was a reason they used bars back in the day.
I agree with you.
This story would be a whole lot different had an elderly woman enjoying the zoo been killed due to some kids taunting a tiger.
If three dumb kids can put everyone in the zoo at risk to be mauled then there is a problem with the zoo.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
Unfortunately, this zoo used the method described by Calvin's dad for testing bridges. The would build a barrier, then have some guy taunt a tiger. If he got eaten, they'd make a larger barrier. Repeat until the guy survived and you have a good standard standard. This zoo decided to measure the last enclosure the tiger ate the guy at and build that one. Slight algorithm error.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
We talked about this problem at length a while back in torts.
Basically, the subject here is one of civil liability. The kids - all under the age of 18 - all had alcohol and marijuana in their bloodstream at the time of the incident (according to police reports). Their alleged taunting could be used against them, not to completely excuse the zoo from guilt (although they'll try), but to reduce the damages. Generally speaking as to torts, a jury can find a defendant partially liable for their own injuries.
I don't think there's too much question here as to the zoo's liability - they failed to build a wall capable of keeping the tiger in, and failed to keep their team of snipers (as per their own emergency plan) on the zoo during all times it was open. But, the zoo will pen its hopes on the theory above, arguing that the kids are at least partially liable. They do have a point - this tiger has certainly faced taunting in the past, and no results like this occurred. But the case for the kids, I think, is a much better. one.
The zoo knows it's trying to shoot the moon by removing full liability from itself, but they could have a reasonable shot at reducing the damages if it goes to court.
Yeah, forbid cars. They are inherently dangerous. Constantly people a dieing in car accidents. Even innocent elderly women.
"We agree that the zoo was at fault."
I don't, the enclosure was designed in the 1930's, it may have been the most advanced of it's time, the design turns out to be flawed (by current standards)That shouldn't automatically make the zoo at fault. If the zoo was ignorant of the enclosures shortcomings, then they are not at fault, If they knew there was a high likelihood that a tiger would escape and kill someone, then they should be held accountable.
"The question we should be asking ourselves is whether we are happy that someone who taunted a tiger died. If we are, we ought be asking why."
I'm not saying I'm happy the guy died after taunting a tiger, I'm indifferent about his death. He should be considered responsible for his actions that led to his being mauled by a tiger.
I think it's unfortunate that the world had to loose a tiger to get rid of an asshole.
Oxygen and Assholes, two things the world will never run out of.
Au contraire! The taunting angle is what makes this story fascinating and worth discussing.
You see, that tiger not only escaped and killed, it then hunted down the other two mooks, who had fled to another part of the park. So, something they said must have really pissed off that cat, and cats generally don't pay attention to what ANYONE says, much less drunken mooks.
Perhaps these guys had seen Night at the Museum, in which the security guard dishes up some serious taunting, eventually leading to a dinosaur roaming the city. That movie makes it OK to taunt a monkey and cavemen. And Mongolians. And diorama-folk.
This story is also a metaphor for one society's subjugation of another, or even the racial imbalance of our prison system, where taunting leads to violence. Maybe it is even metaphor for this year's Superbowl, where the NFL is the zoo administration, the Pats are the mooks, and the Giants are a caged tiger, yearning to pounce and dominate.
Besides, where is your outrage for the shooting of the tiger? If zoo staff had done their jobs that cat could have been returned to its cage to await trial, much as errant pit bulls are put on trial. But a really bad zoo administration exposed that unknowing cat to the lethal harm of a cop with a weapon drawn.
And any mook from the street knows how dangerous THAT can be...
Taunting tigers at the Zoo. Well of course he deserved to die.
He gives all of us something to email each other with the title of "Darwin Award Winners"
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Some idiot might stick his tongue into a power socket in your home?
Well, we know babies stick fingers into power sockets. And if a baby is in your home, it's probably your issue. So you would have the choice--protect your kid from your power sockets, or join the Darwin Awards.
(And, you CAN use plastic inserts to protect that baby, so you can have your lamp and light it, too.)
I'm all for personal responsibility, but when you consider that thousands of visitors pass that cage every single day, the law of probability dictates that someone will do something stupid. So, if the cat can escape from it's cage, it will. It's simply an eventuality. Knowing this, how can any responsible zookeeper *not* do everything in it's power to prevent the tiger from being able to leap out of its cage.
"Evolution in action."
-- the citizens of Todos Santos
The zoo is *not* "at fault". This enclosure existed for many years with the current species of tiger enclosed in it and no one was attacked from the observation deck.
In walks this ass-hat and he begins to taugnt the tigers. You know what's really at fault? Nature. Nature is at fault. And as I see it, *Nature* isn't even at fault. Nature did it's job by thinning the gene pool before this shithead could breed.
Certainly the zoo will have to improve all if its animal enclosures to ensure that *innocent* people arn't killed in the future by the actions of people dumb enough to tempt an attack by another dangerous animal.
Today's Life-lesson is: Don't live to be an example of what *not* to do.
Designed in 1930? This means almost 80 years no problems. I know from another zoo that they are well aware that the tigers could jump over the barriers, they just don't do it: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=438748&cid=22261598
Even now I think the enclosure was absolutely sufficient. I am not a friend of nanny state attitudes. An enclosure where by an asshole aggravated tiger can escape from is unacceptable? Forbid cars, power sockets or even knifes. Improperly used they can kill. And actually do. Much more often then taunted tigers in zoos world wide.
The zoo definitely needs to be held accountable for the loss of human life. However, since the man was found to be taunting the animal, and the police ended up shooting it, his family should be responsible for the loss of the animal's life. Tigers are becoming increasingly rare. I can't say the same about jackasses.
Easy, just imagine the tiger is a perfect sphere with no friction...
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The autopsy done on the tiger showed shattered and broken claws from scrambling over the concrete. The tiger didn't just do some anime style super-leap, she got claws on the edge and pulled herself up, shattering claws in the process. This was not a happy tiger that these 3 douchebags happened to get caught by. She was pissed off and looking to confront her tormentors.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
How does the saying go? Don't throw stones at an armed man. Don't stand next the the guy throwing stones at an armed man.
I'm saying the tiger escape is part of a pattern that has occurred ever since the zoo was privatized. It's the tragedy of privatization: people can simply run a business or resource into the ground, take the profits and invest them in the next looting spree. With publicly owned resources, people all share the resource and want it to last because they enjoy it. Private ownership encourages fraud, short sighted cost cutting, and externalizing every expense you can.
Back when the zoo was built, no one knew the enclosure height was a problem. Now, with a private, profit driven entity controlling the zoo, you might think they have an incentive to avoid lawsuits. But what they really have an incentive to do is profit, and if that means letting people die because lawsuits are cheaper than building a replacement enclosure, then so be it. With a public zoo like we have here in Albuquerque, they are more worried about educating the public, conserving species diversity, and yes, their image, than they are about making money.
Sorry to challenge your free market ideology like that, but privatization sucks because profit over everything as a motive sucks. Modern economic research shows that most non-sociopaths are driven more by ideals of fairness and reciprocity than personal gain, so they will not try to profit over all else. What our system actually does is encourage sociopaths.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
We manage a feral cat colony.. part of this was getting them all fixed. Most were done by the Feral Cat Coalition, these people know how to handle ferals... you anethetize them in their traps. A few we took to local vets.
So we finnaly trap our last kitty.. Big Black Cat. Take him to the corner vet in the trap.. we ask the kids there (the vet was gone so surgery was sched for the next day.) if they could deal with Ferals, they said "yeah, they talked with somebody" I suggested they just keep the trap overnight.
They go to transfer BBC into one of their holding kennels. Well, kitty had other plans. That cat was jumping from the floor, bouncing off the ceiling tiles of an 8 foot ceiling. Hid under a cabinet all nite long.
15 pound cat = 8 feet. 300 pound tiger = ???
Well, actually initial eyewitness reports said that his friends were doing most of the taunting, and that he turned to a mother there and apologized for their behavior. It's later articles that I read which didn't use any references (just something vague like "the zoo alleges that he and his friends were taunting the tiger") and now it's been simplified further to "... a Siberian Tiger he had allegedly been taunting at San Francisco zoo at the end of last year." It's interesting to see the facts devolve by convenience of telling.
1) This is the same tiger (Tatiana) that attacked and seriously injured a zookeeper (Lori Komejan) who was only doing her job just one year ago. The zoo initially blamed the attack on the zoo keeper.
From a later article:
2) Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo is incompetent and demoralizing:
3) The zookeepers knew the wall was too low:
4) The police didn't find any slingshots in the cars or on the brothers, anything unusual on their cellphones, foreign objects in the enclosure, or any witnesses to back up any suggestion of taunting, and suspended the investigation.
You can find more articles in the special section that SFGate has just for the tiger mauling.
But people will believe whatever they want to believe, right?
I never said zoos should be banned so I don't understand your analogy. What point are you trying to make?
Just another variation on "the world is under my control, as long as I don't do thing X".
Yeah well that philosophy seemed to have worked for the thousands upon thousands of daily visitors over the course of decades who refrained from viciously taunting an apex predator!
This is a case of the world NOT being in your control. The Tiger escaped. It wasn't supposed to be able to. Do you think going to a Zoo is supposed to be a "risky" thing to do? I don't.. but hey, maybe it is.
You can make any activity "risky" through egregious stupidity. You probably think using a computer isn't very risky... until your drunken friends convince you to play "Headbutt the CRT".
Of course the enclosure should have been safer such that escape was impossible. It's obvious that thinking they were completely safe was the only reason these jackasses felt confident enough to taunt a tiger. Yet at the same time, the level of safety that was provided was sufficient for every other zoo-goer in the history of the exhibit, and without their actions, they would still be alive.
It's not as if the tiger escaped on a whim then attacked a random person who was minding their own business. It escaped from the enclosure because they infuriated it. It escaped from the enclosure because it wanted them. It was so pissed, it wanted them dead. Once it had escaped, it didn't run off, it didn't attack some other random zoo go-er. It wasn't hungry, it didn't stop to feast on its kill. It chased the two still-living people down hundreds of yards away from its enclosure past plenty of other zoo-goers, but it only wanted them, the source of its anger.
What happened was a direct consequence of their actions. They didn't need to control "the world", they only needed to control themselves. That's all the control they needed. "the world is under my control, as long as I don't do thing X" -- well THEY DID THING X and it was stupid and got them killed.
Talking about how this makes going to the zoo "risky", as if this is something that could have randomly happened to anyone, ignores this simple cause-and-effect relationship. And if you want to talk about "risk" as though you're doing statistical risk analysis, look at the actual numbers -- one attack in how many years, how many visitors? But of course any REAL risk analysis would divide the analysis based on risk FACTORS. Statistical risk to idiots who taunt tigers? HIGH. Statistical risk to non-idiots who don't taunt tigers? ZERO.
The enemies of Democracy are
Actually, there has been no evidence that anyone was taunting the tiger. The Zoo stated that they believed that the tiger *may* have been taunted, but there has been no evidence or conclusive statements made to support that position. More likely, the zoo put this idea forward to diminish the public's perception of the Zoo's negligence in this man's death. I would like to see a link to prove me wrong.
And they've got some wicked moves.
Am I the only one who finds it fascinating that the ONLY ones the tiger directly attacked were the 3 guys who were taunting it? That it specifically hunted down the 3 individuals who pissed it off? And they had moved away from the area...
Who says animals are stupid?
The guy probably deserved to die a lot more than the tiger did when all of those trigger happy cops came onto the scene. And if you really think otherwise, I suggest you go watch Planet of the Apes, maybe the reversed perspective will work better for you.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
This is simply not true. This is a rumor that is being flung around various websites, and in fact has been refuted by police investigators. What is true, however, is that after the tiger escaped, the nearby cafe locked it's doors and the staff would not let one of the surviving brothers in while the tiger rampaged outside. In fact, the staff initially thought that the kids were joking, and were late in reacting. Finally, the zoo prevented firefighters and police officers from entering the zoo for up to six minutes before letting them in. These actions seem far more wreckless, yet nobody seems to be repeating these facts. Just the lie about the slingshot.As I wrote in another thread: What if this was not an 18-year old male yelling at the tiger, but a 10 year old girl waving at the tiger and screaming "Hello tiger!". How does the tiger know which is cruelty and which is playful? When we bare our teeth, we are usually smiling but to most animals that is a sign of aggression. As you said in your last post, tigers can't be expected to make the distinction. So does the girl deserve to be killed to?
At the risk of sounding like a greentreepeacehugger, I submit the premise that wild animals should not be caged. They evolved in wide open spaces and basically go insane when penned up in sub-square-mile pens. Witness the incessant pacing we've all seen when any large animal is stuck in a 30x50 cage. Heck, even mice and rats go nuts when stuck in a standard research crate.
Some zoos are working hard to create relatively large spaces for animals, and create the illusion of greater space through lighting and various disguises on the walls. This makes it less likely the animals will be close up for people to view, but much more likely that the (the animals) can feel acclimated and calm down a bit.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Read the follow-up articles. There's a discussion going on about it HERE.
-Clio
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Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I made a nanny state analogy. No, you did not say zoos should be banned. But try to get a decent chemistry set, like the ones I got during my childhood. Impossible. Why? Probably because something happened and the same discussion stated. Too dangerous, this never should have been possible, yada yada. I like current zoos. But I suppose next time I want to see a tiger in a zoo I have to bring some good binoculars to watch the tigers in a 40 meter deep hole, 1 km away through a 20 cm sheet of bulletproof glass.
Read the goddamn follow-up articles. They were just trying to save face. And it worked on schmoes like you who swallow it up and don't consider that it might be a bunch of bullshit. You know they seized their cellphones and such and found 0 evidence of taunting.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
That story is nearly the opposite of everything I heard, short of the wall being too low. I'm not saying I disbelieve it, but I'm not going to just switch my opinion instantly.
It also doesn't change much. The slingshot thing, yes, that makes something of a difference, but only in degree.
If it was a 10-year-old girl screaming "Hi tiger!" then no, she wouldn't have deserved to die, regardless of the tiger's inability to distinguish the two. The intent is what counts, and from all accounts, even if the zoo situation was as screwed up as the ABC article states, that kid's intent was nothing but malicious. The girl would be a tragedy, this is justice.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Well done, I do remember that. Cartoons can be helpful -- maybe I internalized that joke as a kid and thus don't dare tigers to come nail me. And knowing is half the battle.
According to the SFGate diagram, the distance from the edge of the grotto to the top of the "new" safety wall is 33 feet over and 9 feet up.
According go the calculations in the arXiv article, the tiger can theoretically jump 33 feet over and 12.5 feet up--clearing the "new" safety wall by an easy 3.5 feet vertical.
That might be theoretical, but you still won't find me standing there . . .
Considering that this tiger had already attacked humans multiple times before, are you really so naive and falsely optimistic as to think tigers never go around indiscriminately killing? Have you ever owned a cat??? http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/07/tiger.attack/index.html#cnnSTCText "Inspector Valerie Matthews said the investigation had found no evidence that Paul and Kulbir Dhaliwal taunted a 350-pound tiger"
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
"People taunt tigers in zoos every single day in this country;"
That is correct, but the OP used the wrong word. The idiots ATTACKED the tiger, using a weapon. And then stuck around and brought more attention to themselves, allowing the tiger to focus and attack in return.
When dealing with wild animals/forces of nature, there is no justice, no rights, no "deserve". The Boxing day tsunami cared nothing for whether those people "deserved" to die, and neither did the tiger. Perhaps this incident will serve to remind more people of their real place in he cosmos.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Its not about the Zoo's fault, its about the guy not deserving to die. Maybe experience something he could recover from, but die?
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
All follow-up articles stated that the authorities concluded, after investigation, that there was NO taunting. Also: This specific tiger had already attacked humans multiple times before! http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/07/tiger.attack/index.html#cnnSTCText "Inspector Valerie Matthews said the investigation had found no evidence that Paul and Kulbir Dhaliwal taunted a 350-pound tiger"
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Physicist conducts analysis, concludes that thing which already happened is theoretically possible.
Sounds like an argument against filesharing copyrighted material as well. The odds that you'll be one of the lucky people served by the RIAA is miniscule--you think you are safe. But in the taunting hides the risk of being eaten by their tiger team of lawyers.
"But that shouldn't be illegal," you protest. Perhaps. But a Siberian tiger shouldn't be able to jump over a retaining wall, either. Predation happens.
I was at this zoo last May and do remember the lion house as they call it with the tiger enclosures. The tigers (including the one in this situation) were just lying about or walking around. The moat does look fairly deep and the fence is very close to the moat edge. It would take some severe irritation to get one of them to take the time to try to escape and attack you. There are benches right behind the fence and I felt in no danger at all...but I wasn't intoxicated and taunting them either. Also, getting down into the moat from the grass is a big drop and the tigers didn't see interested in going down there. I also could not see how the tiger could get much of a running jump in the moat. I imagine their taunting must have enraged it to the point that the massive andrenaline rush gave it the boost it needed. Pure anecdotal evidence, but that is what I noticed there last year.
You don't want to press any buttons you're not supposed to.
(LIke the big red "turn Warp Core Containment Off" button)
If it teaches all the other 6 year olds to not be little shits, yes. People are sorely lacking the realization that they CANNOT control everything, they can only control their own actions, and need to be held responsible for their own actions sometimes.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Ever seen an alligator snapping turtle? I wouldn't tease one of them...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Every follow-up article (which people don't usually bother to read) has said that the investigation concluded THERE WAS NO TAUNTING. That was just FUD on the zoo's part. And you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/07/tiger.attack/index.html#cnnSTCText
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
People aren't saying "ahhhh my life is safe, I don't taunt tigers". They're saying: "if you DO taunt tigers, bad things are likely to happen". There's a clear difference between the two.
I disagree. It's a rationalization going on. The tiger DID escape from the cage.. but the rationalization is "Oh.. it only escaped because the guy was taunting it". We don't really know that, nor do we know what other circumstances the tiger could escape.
Discussing this particular occurance devoid of the context (the taunting) would seem to be enormously unwise.
I understand the context, I just don't think it should be over-emphasized (which it seems to me it is). Tigers aren't supposed to be able to escape from cages in a Zoo. It doesn't matter if the guy was taunting it, holding meat in front of it, etc. That's just a cardinal rule. The problem here is that people are using some kind of moral or value judgment to diminish the massive safety failing that happened.
AccountKiller
Its not about the Zoo's fault, its about the guy not deserving to die. Maybe experience something he could recover from, but die?
Yes, DIE. If you are stupid enough to taunt a large tiger, you deserve to die. It's that simple. Every other animal on earth is supposedly not as smart as a human, but they're all smart enough not to taunt large predators, because as small as their brains are, they know that it's a bad idea. So when a human does this, you think they deserve to live? Sorry, no. People that stupid have no business sharing space with the rest of us, or worse, reproducing and making similarly stupid kids. That level of stupidity is simply inexcusable.
Every follow-up article (which people don't usually bother to read) has said that the investigation concluded THERE WAS NO TAUNTING. That was just FUD on the zoo's part. And you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/07/tiger.attack/index.html#cnnSTCText
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Or as a friend of mine commented, "If they were six-foot cuddly bunny-rabbits, we'd have called them bunny-rabbits, not tigers!"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I visited the SF zoo about a week before the incident. The tiger enclosures have a grassy area, level with the spectators, which is then surrounded by a 12ft deep by 30ft wide dry moat. The dry moat has a pathway down into it on the tigers' side so that the tigers can climb into and out of it at will. If the tiger lept from the bottom of the moat, it would need to go 12ft vertically to get up the spectator-side. But the ideal path would be to leap from the grassy area inside the moat, straight across to the spectator area - 33ft distance, but none vertical.
Since in ballistics, a trajectory of 55 degrees is equivalent to 35 degrees in distance (though not in azumith), if we eliminate the 12ft requirement from the equation, we can see that the 33ft leap is possible with the same speed, but with as little as a 35 degree angle. Taking into account that a faster speed with a shallower trajectory is also theoretically possible and that by leaping from its hind legs and landing with its front, the tiger's body length effectively shortens the distance a good 6-8 ft, this makes it pretty obvious that the leap is more than plausible.
Obviously the tiger escaped the enclosure, so some sort of escape must have been possible - the real question is only, should the architects have known how easy the leap would be? And the answer seems a resounding, yes.
And here is a photo that explicitly shows that the tiger and the spectators are on level ground. In the photo, you can't see the dry moat which lies between the bamboo and the grassy area:
http://www.citizen.co.za/index/AFPData/english/shared/top/SGE.NIN80.261207042337.photo00.photo.default-512x356.jpg
Humans have pathetic jumping ability, even the basketball stars, compared to cats (or most animals for that matter). Humans' advantage is their bipedal nature and the flexibility that offers for things like climbing, carrying large objects, etc. For things like running and jumping, we simply suck. My housecats could outrun me.
House cats can easily jump a 6-foot wall. I see it all the time here in Phoenix, where all our back yards are separated by 6-foot block walls, and it's common to see cats running around on top of them. This is for a cat which stands less than 12" at the shoulder and weighs 10 pounds or less. A Siberian tiger weighs 300-450 pounds. These animals are huge, and they're at least as well-muscled as a housecat. It makes perfect sense that they could jump over the wall at this zoo, given sufficient motivation.
If you've ever had the privilege of being very close to a large cat, you'd have a better appreciation of their size and musculature. I got to sit next to a cage with a mountain lion at a zoo once (one of the zookeepers let me in the back to see it); mountain lions aren't anywhere near as large as tigers, maybe about the size of a large dog, except that they have FAR more muscle than any dog of that height and length. I wouldn't ever want to tangle with a mountain lion; it's possible to fight one off if you have to, but many people have been killed by them in the wild, and many others severely injured. Tigers are much bigger than this; fighting with a tiger is like fighting with a bear. You're probably going to lose.
They calculated the linear velocity that a tiger would need for a take-off angle of 55 degrees. But that is relevant only if the zoo has thoughtfully provided a 55 degree launch ramp for the tiger. Building up speed in one direction is one thing, it is easy to imagine that a tiger with a running start can accelerate to the required horizontal velocity of a little over 15 miles per hour. But to achieve the required total velocity of about 27 mph, the tiger also needs to be able to accelerate vertically to 21.9 mph, and it doesn't get a run-up to accelerate to that speed--it needs to do that in one step (well, leap).
So does anybody know how how high a tiger can jump from a standing start? (I doubt if running helps much for altitude) Basically, it needs to be able to jump as high as the wall. Although to be fair, they did a center of mass calculation--a real tiger wouldn't have to get its COM over the wall, just get high enough for its forepaws to reach the top, and it might have enough momentum and friction to run up the wall a step or so.
The zoo is at fault ONLY for the death of the tiger, not the death of the human. The human is responsible for his own death, since he taunted the tiger.
Plus, there's a difference between a 6 year old and a teenager or adult, which this guy was. But even a 6 year old should have enough sense to not taunt a 350 pound tiger; if they don't, I won't mourn their death by tiger mauling.
The number of tigers in zoos is about 4000.
As many as 3000 tigers may be in farms in China, being raised to sell as traditional medicine for people whose penises aren't big enough or who think their bones will make them stronger.
The number of tigers that are kept as pets by Americans is about 6000. There are animal activists like Tippi Hedren trying to make laws against keeping tigers as pets, because almost nobody who has pet tigers has enough space and resources to let them live like tigers need to, especially the occasional drug dealer in some apartment building in New York who wanted to out-macho his competitors' pit bulls. She's well-intentioned, but the species needs all the genetic diversity it can get, even though tigers aren't meant to live like house-cats.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
for an extremely informative post. Doubly deserving of moderation when contrasted with the misinformation in grandparent's post.
A lot of predatory behavior is learned, not instinctual. That's why your pet tabby will play with a mouse instead of killing and eating it. Chasing after a little furry blob is hard-wired, but a cat needs a mother to teach it to (a) administer a killing blow, rather than just playing with it, and (b) eat it afterwards.
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
The question we should be asking ourselves is whether we are happy that someone who taunted a tiger died. If we are, we ought be be asking why.
What's wrong with being happy about that? The guy was a moron and an asshole. To be any stupider than to taunt a tiger, you'd have to be declared mentally retarded. Seriously, you can't get much stupider than to taunt a 350-pound killing machine.
Would you feel bad for someone who swam around in shark-infested waters teasing great white sharks, and got eaten by one? Of course not (at least I hope not). When people do incredibly stupid things, it's not a tragedy when they die. People's deaths are tragedies when they did nothing wrong, and nothing to deserve that, like some person walking down a sidewalk when a piano falls on their head. But when people actively do stupid and reckless things which unsurprisingly result in their death, I don't see what's wrong in not only not feeling bad about it, but even laughing at it and saying they deserved it. That's what the entire Darwin Awards concept is based on, after all.
This is basic survival here. If you want to survive to old age, then you use your brain a little bit and don't do incredibly stupid things which cause you to get killed. Taunting tigers falls into this category. If you do, it's no big loss.
Please Do Not Feed The Tiger With Face
The enemies of Democracy are
Think how far tigers have advanced in the last 80 years!
*Exactly*.
The so called calculations are crap. The top speed is irrelevant to the jump distance as dy/dt or vertical velocity at takeoff has everything to do with available muscle power at that time. If you are going top speed, you CANNOT jump super distances, but if you are going a little slower, you have that reserve for the upward jump which gives you distance. To get height, you have to almost stop - see high jump.
Horizontal velocity is the distance and depends on your speed.
Vertical velocity is the time you'll spend in the air before gravity pulls you back down.
Both depend on your total impulse power and top "RPMs" of your leg muscles (kind of constant). The paper just treats the problem as an inlined plane trajectory - WAY too simplistic to reality.
This turns out to be a differential equation. The "paper" just describes maximum distance at a best take off angle. The tiger could NEVER do what the paper describes. It can't go 25 miles per hour from one jump!! That is the scenario described by the paper. The jump angle is always shallow. The larger the angle, the less the total velocity because you have to translate horizontal muscle motion into vertical impulse.
Finally, your diagram makes it much more believable that a tiger CAN jump the distance. Humans can come close to the distance the tiger jumped in your diagram. The new addition will make the jump impossible.
No dude, it was the mice. Dolphins are #2, and humans are a distant #3. You need to read further ;)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The real reason the wall worked that long is that none of the tigers had previously felt motivated enough to jump at it. Apparently Siberians are more aggressive than Bengals, and maybe the two drunk kids pissed her off or just acted enough like prey or cat toys that she went for them. My cats sit on the couch looking out the window at Bird TV, and when one of them sees a laser pointer red dot he has to jump for it without thinking about it first (the other one says "Hey, stop wavin' that thing around".) And I've seen zoo leopards looking at the crowds, intensely tracking the smaller ones that get separated a bit from their herds; I'd feel much safer around tigers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Isn't that always the way it works? Someone else taunts it, dumps agro, and somehow the guy being civil gets critically struck. Talk about being a tank in a bad situation. Seriously. Do not PUG San Francisco Zoo . . . there is no group rez.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't, huh? Spend too much, Government BAD! Cut costs, Government BAD! Where I'm from, the government is less likely to cut corners because if they cut costs, their budget gets cut. Sad, but true.
So, government cutting corners makes it okay for corporations to to do it? I suppose Clinton getting a blow job means it's okay that Bush lied to get us into a war? Nice logic.
At least with government there is some accountability to all citizens, not just voting shareholders.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I don't think the vulture was having any more luck teleporting through the bars than anybody else has at teleporting macroscopic objects.
Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that she was doing her best to quantum tunnel back into the cage. She was certainly trying to get as close to the bars as possible to raise the probability of spontaneous tunneling as high as she could.
But it's not something he deserved to die for.
I'd say according to the laws of nature, death is exactly what he deserves.
If you're too slow, weak, or stupid to avoid getting eaten by a predator, you deserve to die.
It applies to every other animal on earth. Why not humans, too?
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
I think the calculation is too simplistic. Translating ground speed into an inclined leap is not quite right. I've ridden jumper horses for many years, and the world jumping height record is around 7'6". Some horses can also leap a span of almost 20', but only get maybe 3-4' off the ground at while doing so. Also, the highest jumps are approached at a slow speed (a horse can jump 5' or more from a standstill). Of course, this is a tiger, not a horse, and one that isn't saddled with the weight of a human on it's back. But I just can't see such an enormous leap, even from such an athletic animal.
The problem is we don't have enough tigers.
As the owner of a house cat, I am not surprised in the slightest...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
It doesn't matter *how* you create the mankilling tiger. Yes, so sad for the tiger, but you can be damn sure I'll choose for the tiger to die over any human life.
And contrary to popular thought, this wasn't the first time the tiger mauled somebody. It had mauled one of the zoo staff prior to being taunted by this punk kid. It's fair to say that this previous incident lowered the tiger's threshold for going on a kill frenzy.
Yelling and waving is taunting?!? Most people I've talked to assumed taunting meant some type of physical abuse (Throwing rocks). If their "Taunting" is simply yelling and waving their arms, then that makes me think it's pretty much 0% their fault. Hell, yelling and waving arms usually REPELS animals, even predators -- even bears.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
also we must define taunting. physical taunting, or just yelling? The word apparently makes most people think of *physical* attack. If it's just yelling, then I'm quite pissed at all the people who somehow think it's acceptable that the tiger did this. "Oh, he's just being a tiger, doing what tigers do!" Yes, well, so were the humans.. Under the expectation that a zoo would not release a wild animal on them. And would at least have a goddamned security guard with a tranquilizer gun! WTF! The ambulance wouldn't even come until the police arrived because everyone was so scared. If the authorities can't deal with a situation, then that just puts more onus on the zoo to have someone on hand at all times who can deal with such threats. If we have cops tasering elementary school children, we can certainly have a security guard with a tranq-gun in a zoo. Zoo's fault. 100%.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
And millions have walked by this very tiger pen and not died.
Who is John Galt?
Who's fault would it be if the tiger killed someone else who just happened to be there?
This isn't punishment.
This is just what happened. A person didn't sit down and think, "hey, let's get a tiger to maul this kid." If I did that, I would be wrong in every way imaginable.
And the fact is, you're just as wrong as people blaming the brothers for everything. Sorry, but three 17-19-year-old kids down some vodka, smoke some herb, and drive their BMW to the zoo, and they're going to be well behaved? You act like you're certain they did nothing wrong. Well, in my experience, the kind of 17-year-olds that have access to liquor, pot and BMWs in the morning on a school day are almost never well-behaved. Stereotype? Yes. Doesn't mean it's wrong, and lacking better evidence, it's what I'm going with. I find it very hard to believe that the tiger jumped out of its cage and mauled these people unprovoked. The woman who got clawed by this tiger before was a fool. I won't even take food away from a dog with my bare hand, and she tried it on a tiger? In-fucking-sane. Yes, the zoo was mismanaged, but people are just too damn dumb to live.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Somehow the taunting is pretty fundamental to the way people are reacting to the story. Perhaps it's the desire to see an accident in terms of exceptional circumstances that don't apply to us. Perhaps it's a revenge fantasy for every asshole who made life a little more unpleasant. Perhaps, in some removed way, people see it as a cartoon rather than a real, bloody death. But, somehow, people DO care that this guy died, and the circumstances of the taunting profoundly color people's reaction.
I feel sorry for this guy's family. I feel sorry for the tiger.
Hmm.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Taunting is quite vague. If they were just yelling and posturing and screaming, that's just a human being a human; it's our nature to act like the apes we are. I don't think that should result in even 1% of a loss of liability owed to them. I also don't think dangling anything into the cage is any more than a violation of zoo rules that should result in them getting kicked out. I don't think it makes them liable for what happened. People are going to be the apes they are.
But say, for example, they threw ninja throwing stars into the tiger's flesh.... THAT is morally reprehensible. However, I would still judge the zoo to be 100% liable in the event of the tiger leaping a wall that was NOT tall enough (I would expect cruelty to animal criminal charges though!!!).
A cage/enclosure is supposed to guarantee unconditional safety, and that is most certainly an expectation the public has when entering a zoo. If they posted a sign "caution: walls are 25% shorter than they should be, and tigers can jump 25% higher when taunted", I actually think nobody would want to go there. And if they did, it would constitute such a real risk that it would be borderline child-abuse to bring your child to the zoo! No, no, no. We all have a reasonable expectation of safety at the zoo.
And the paramedics wouldn't even show up for like what, 30 minutes? They were scared of the tiger that was lose, and wouldn't show. They waited for the police. Clearly, the authorities DO NOT WORK in this situation, yet the zoo still can't bother to have ONE QUALIFIED INDIVIDUAL who can fire a tranquilizer gun from a safe vantage? The zoo was pretty damn helpless here, and it's pretty much all their fault. I don't know the "violence timeline", but if any injuries occurred near the end of it, those specifically could have been avoided by the zoo having trained personnel on hand. And if their walls aren't high enough to prevent a tiger from jumping them (they weren't!) -- then the onus is on them that much more to have trained personnel on hand to diffuse such a situation.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Actually that tiger did attack a zoo keeper about a year ago...
He was with them and, presumably, also taunted them.
Normal thing. Tigers (and the other big cats) hate their keepers. Don't want to type all this again: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=438748&cid=22263954
Here you go: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22719922/ "One of the three victims of San Francisco Zoo tiger attack was intoxicated and admitted to yelling and waving at the animal while standing atop the railing of the big cat enclosure, police said in court documents filed Thursday." So even if the man who was killed wasn't taunting, one of the men he was with was. So maybe his family should be liable for the death.
Hmmmm. I have a 12-gauge in my closet, and I sure don't see any tigers around here! It must work! :-D
it was that this guy got mauled it is interesting to note that it was someone taunting the tiger. Versus someone who was just admiring it. The tiger mauls him and then jumps back in again, hmm.
Which begs the other question, how do you taunt a tiger in such a scenario? Being that if you were too obvious one would think someone would have interferred.
I've seen tigers in the wild, but I was safely in a car and nobody yelled at them or anything like that. They simply rested in the shade and looked like they could care less. (Pretty typical of cats in general.) Which again brings the question; what did he do to taunt it? Does any article relay that?
Too bad the tiger couldn't have killed the instigator. That would have been better and placed less blame on the zoo, right? Because a person forfeits their right to life when they taunt a supposedly-caged animal, right? It's one of those death penalty offenses, like murder, right?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I agree completely. Have you ever looked down into the water before jumping off the dock into a beautiful northern lake? I have and once something was looking back. A very large reptilian something with a sharp beak, scaly shell and beady eyes. It swam away and I didn't swim that day.
No, I think they did something very, very stupid. But I also feel like they should not have died, and did not deserve to. Why do people make every situation out to be mutually exclusive?
As for the female zookeeper, I haven't read enough about what her story was. I do know that the zoo was held liable and fined $10,000. And I think she's suing (or sued) the zoo. But I'll take your claim at face value.
Either way, I think we're more in agreement than it seems. We both think that the zoo was mismanaged. We both agree that the tiger was provoked. What I'm saying is that if a tiger *can* jump out of it's cage, it *will* jump out of it's cage, it's just a matter of time. If it wasn't these stupid kids, it would be some totally innocent bystander that inadvertantly does something that pisses the tiger off. Maybe the tiger just gets hungry or restless. Who knows. The point is that you shouldn't have to examine the psychological underpinnings of 350lb. siberian tiger to figure out how culpible the zoo is. Regardless of what made the tiger jump out of the cage, it jumped out of the cage, period. And that it was able to means that the people in charge should be nailed to the wall.
and never had a problem. Sheesh!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
That would be an unfortunate incident, but it seems that the tiger was goal driven.
The tragedy is that the other two got away.
Barbara Felden claims prior art on the flip phone, sues Motorola, Nokia.
more like 800 lbs (I dunno really), but I like how if they made a person mad and the person killed all 3 of them -- everyone would hate the person, and he would be charged with a murder. But suddenly when an animal does it, somehow the victim becomes the perpetrator. This is supposedly because the animal is stupider, so my question is -- If I taunt a 350 lb retarded person and he kills me and 2 of my friends, is that justice too?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The mauled men have inadvertently made the zoo a safer place. Sooner or later, a tiger would have been able to escape - and let's just be glad that it turned out to be drunken teens waving at the tiger rather than immature kids who yell and scream. In either case, it's the zoo's fault for enabling the tiger to escape.
Well, the one submission I did (that was attributed to me) had the quotes completely changed by the editor, which to many people confused the issue -- some said they preferred my original submission. But I won't hold it against the editor, as he at least read the article, and it seemed like he tried.
Of course, this time the editor appears to not even read the article and, thus, leaves in an unsubstantiated, inflammatory opinion of the submitter. I can only hope it was unintentional.
Maybe someone will come forward later, a weapon and a ladder will be found, as well as several pounds of kitty treats and catnip. But until then, I don't see how I can change my mind that this was the victims' fault for being killed and mauled by an escaped known people-mauling tiger from a known defective enclosure. But I really don't care if they were launching mortars into there. The cat, especially one with a prior history, should never have been able to get out.
Suppose I were to show you a way to manufacture a wall that would do the same job but be only one inch thick...Would that be worth something to you, laddie?
So what? It was still interesting enough that an editor approved it. This isn't just like free, unrestricted advertising. Tell me: if you write a post on your low-traffic blog, what are the odds that someone else will come along and find it post-worthy? If you think it's suitable for Slashdot. go ahead and post it and see if it gets approved. What's the problem here?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Good point, especially considering that police have already testified in court documents to a belief that the first idiot who was attacked ("Carlos Sousa Jr.", age 17) was trying to impress his friends, acting like some kind of badass by taunting the tiger and dangling limbs into the enclosure. Given that the tiger was...a tiger, It's not really surprising that the tiger would take advantage of a marginal wall and try to get a good clamp on the whole ignorant gang, is it?
Consider that there was once a time in human history when the humanoid who didn't know not to go near a tiger, or not to run the hell away from it at the first opportunity, simply ended up tiger food, and our species ended up stronger because of it.
So far, the so-called victims have contradicted other eyewitness accounts and denied any involvement in provoking the tiger or, worse yet, giving the animal means to escape (with a board or other instrument). Their side of the story comes as a predicate to potential litigation, so you can understand that the incentive to lie about what really happened is strong.
People are people. They sure as hell do get specail rights against wild animals. What, did you think we invented guns just for show? Tell you what, I'll agree to "be on my own" just as soon as they agree to let me bring a shotgun into the zoo. Until then, I expect the zoo to keep their animals properly secured. No matter how much I taunt the animal, it should not be able to escape it's enclosure.
I was listening to the news this morning, and a zoo official said "we realize that it will not be possible for us to prove that the tiger was properly contained". Well, no shit, if the tiger can escape, it is not properly contained. It scares me that the zoo officials are just now figuring this out, I knew that as soon as I heard the tiger had escaped and eaten someone.
Lions, tigers, bears, elephants, wolves, monkeys, and sharks have been characterized as wild animals. (Rosenbloom v. Hanour Corp. (1998) 66 Cal.App.4th 1477, 1479, fn. 1 [78 Cal.Rptr.2d 686].)
An owner of a wild animal is strictly liable to persons who are injured by the animal: "In such instances the owner is an insurer against the acts of the animal, to one who is injured without fault, and the question of the owner's negligence is not in the case." (Opelt v. Al G. Barnes Co. (1919) 41 Cal.App. 776, 779 [183 P. 241].)
"[I]f the animal which inflicted the injury is vicious and dangerous, known to the defendant to be such, an allegation of negligence on the part of defendant is unnecessary and the averment, if made, may be treated as surplusage." (Baugh v. Beatty (1949) 91 Cal.App.2d 786, 791 [205 P.2d 671].)
A wild animal, of a type to be known to have a vicious nature, is presumed to be vicious. (Baugh, supra, 91 Cal.App.2d at p. 791.) Accordingly, an instruction on the owner's knowledge of its ferocity is unnecessary. (Id. at pp. 791-792.)
Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
What?
Mark: Oh . . . I used to be the captain of my own cruise ship. It was the kind of boat folks rent for weddings, parties, you know, that kind of thing. But on the night in question it had been rented for a prom. Oh, the girls looked so lovely in their dresses, the boys such fine little gentlemen in their tuxedos. They were all drinking and dancing and spiking the punch. I was dizzy with delight when suddenly - my ship sank. We all went into the water. Then came Skoora, picking us off one by one by one by one. Till only I was left. And as he bore down on me, he paused as if to say, "What can I do? I'm a shark. I eat." And then he cut me in half, cut me right in half - my wife measured me, I'm exactly half my former length. But as he swam away with my lower extremeties dangling from his jaw, I swear to god he was crying.
.Skoora, the gentle shark.
Kevin: Crying?
Mark: Yes, crying. Oh to be sure, he's a brutal killing machine. But he shows more remorse than I've ever seen in a human.
Everyone: . .
Skoora, Skoora. He's a killer with a broken heart.
Don't blame him! He blames himself.
Don't hate him! He hates himself.
Skoora, Skoora. Skoora the gentle shark.
Intoxicated (or just plain stupid) boys taunt tiger. Tiger responds, doing what taunted tigers do. Unfortunately the tiger dies.
"Fear is the rootkit of democracy.." Blarkon
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"The repeated mentioning of this guy taunting the animal irritates me, because it seems to imply it was his fault."
They did "volunteer" for what happened. I don't mourn people who are that stupid. Too bad about the tiger, but he sorted those punks attitude problem quite nicely.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
But anyway..... To be serious... If all it takes is looking one in the eye to make it charge you, then that makes it that much more the zoo's fault for not having a safe enclosure made to the nationally recommended height...
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Point taken, but that's not what they did. You don't have a reasonable expectation of safety when you are inside a tiger cage. You do have a reasonable expectation of safety when you are in the grounds of a public zoo -- or any other public place. In general, if anything happens to you safety-wise that could have been prevented - you are liable. If you have a 6 foot fence around your pool, but your pool isn't covered, and kids climb the fence, get into the pool, and die (I believe this is the 2nd leading cause of teenage deaths after car accidents) -- Guess what. You're liable.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
For the curious, the final mods on the ggp post are:
Insightful +1
Insightful +1
Flamebait -1
Underrated +1
Overrated -1
Insightful +1
Overrated -1
Insightful +1
Overrated -1
Overrated -1
Overrated -1
Insightful +1
Overrated -1
Leaving it at Flamebait, 0
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
This is absolutely true. When I was a kid we had a female wire hair fox terrier (well fed, may I add). This dog was very friendly, never bit anyone and let young children use her as a horse subsitute. But she had the nasty habit to dig holes about everywhere (that's where the 'terrier' part comes from, I guess), and once her hole led her to our neighbour's chicken encolusre. She killed 30 of them in less than 5 minutes. Extremely effective. We had to buy all the chicken ;-)
No matter how stupid the individual was who climbed the wall, death by tiger was not warranted. What if a 5-yr old managed to do the same thing? Would we condemn the parents, the child, the child's lack of good DNA? *gasp* It's not "reasonably" safe to take your kids to the zoo.
The CRIME was the tauting of the dangers animal by a bunch of idiots.
I nominate these clowns for the Darwin Awards...
Any contraption intended to keep a person safe, that requires human subjective calculations to keep the user safe is badly designed.
You should not need to think about the danger if the contraption is designed correctly and it is used according to instructions.
Contraptions of any kind protecting human life should be immune to human error.
As for your example of people walking behind fenced areas and hopping that their good judgment will be enough to protect them, well, what can I say, myopic idiotic views like this cause accidents.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Animals respond to tone, pitch, projection, and volume, not vocabulary. It's just human psychology that "Stop" will be yelled in a firmer and more attention-getting voice than "here, kitty". Try telling your dog "what a good puppy" in a firm, demanding voice. Or alternately, try telling him "I'm going to wring your fsking neck, you worthless bastard" in a cooing voice. It's possible, but doesn't come naturally.
It doesn't take logic, in this kind of case instinct is a good guide, and I'm sure the cops acted on instinct - well, except for the running for your life part. Logic just backs up the instinctual actions after the fact.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.