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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."
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.
All prior researchers have not returned from the jungle. Information is incomplete.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Unfortunately, the zoo made their initial estimates for the enclosure based on the ballistic characteristics of a Southern Asian tiger carrying a coconut, not an unladen Siberian tiger, so their calculations were off slightly.
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.
before I finally decide.
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
35 mi/hr across the ground != 26 mi/hr at a 55 deg angle. I'd like to see how they propose converted that lateral velocity to the highly inclined one.
This is high school physics done badly. Very poor analysis.
I 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.
They did, unfortunately the calculations were only accurate for spherical tigers leaping in a vacuum.
Who ordered that?
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
Now jump that fence or I shall taunt you a second time.
This is an example of the tragedy of privatization.
How so? The fence is the same height today it was when it was a public zoo. The zoo was public when the fence was built. Seems a better case can be made that public zoos don't know how to design safe tiger enclosures.
"The tiger didn't go crazy, that tiger went tiger!" --Chris Rock
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1. Tigers have practically no natural instincts when it comes to being predators. Tigers in the wild have to be trained by their mothers how to do things like hunt, climb trees, eat properly, etc. These are things that a human cannot teach. Therefore, any tiger born in captivity cannot be released into the wild and survive. It simply does not have the skills necessary.
2. Look at the way these tigers were trained. Just two bites, and then they get their kill. They can eat it whenever they want. Now observe the way that they killed the 40 animals released into the zoo. Killing frenzy? Yes. By all definitions, that's a killing frenzy. But was that killing frenzy a product of their instincts? No! If you've done any research or paid attention to anything about tigers, you would quickly learn that my first point is quite correct and proven. Tigers have no natural instincts when it comes to killing their prey. Again, observe how it was trained to hunt and how it slaughtered the wild animals: in the same fashion. This is because it knows no other way to kill animals. You say, 'welcome to the world of wild animals.' I say, 'welcome to the world of tigers not being properly trained by their human caretakers.' All tigers are in captivity are oversized house cats, and about just as aggressive. This means yes you need to be careful, but it means no they're not just going to kill you because they're hungry.
3. Which leads me to my third point. where you say:
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". Well, you put your certainty in the wrong place. Unless the tiger in TFA was trained to attack and kill humans for food, the chances of it deciding to just jump out of its cage and go on an eating frenzy is virtually zero. A tiger must be TRAINED to be a predator, and it must be TRAINED to attack humans for food or for pleasure. In the wild, this training is not done by instincts like you so ignorantly proposed, but by the tigers mother. And this leads me to my fourth point:4. You know nothing of tigers. (See opening sentence)
This is unfortunately true. An animal that has actually overcome its instincts of avoidance (often due to unfortunate necessity) and killed a human becomes much more likely to do it again. There are no animals that, in the wild, are naturally mankillers, but there have been many documented instances of certain individuals becoming mankillers. Whatever the circumstances were and how unfair they were that provoked the first attack, once an individual animal has killed a man successfully, it becomes much more likely to do it again and again. Sadly, it's usually some stupid man who's turned the animal into a mankiller, but the fact remains that the animal now is a mankiller, and needs to be dealt with accordingly. I don't mourn for the idiot who provokes and gets killed in the first place, but one must deal realistically with the animal to prevent future innocent victims.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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?
Actually, in this case it was SF police officers with .40 sidearms. I imagine that they were able to win only because there were so many rounds expended, as handgun rounds are hardly adequate for this sort of animal.
In any case, most folks believe that human life is more important than animal life, so when a police officer arrives to find a "rare" tiger mauling a "common" human, you can't be surprised when he opts to kill kill the freaking cat. The suggestion that the lives of a few humans should be willfully sacrificed to preserve the life of an animal flies against our built-in desire to preserve our race, so don't expect to be popular when you make it.