Posted on 12/28/2007 4:59:07 PM PST by repinwi
The safety inspector may share in the liability with the zoo. But the zoo has known about this problem for at least 10 years, and done nothing. So yes, they are liable for their lack of action.
Read more here:
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Marian Roth-Cramer recalled the day she and her son, who was 4 or 5, visited the tiger exhibit in 1997.
“My son had his hands on the metal bar,” said the San Francisco woman, a children’s dance and family programs coordinator at a branch of the YMCA. “All of a sudden, I saw the tiger leap over the moat, put a paw on the dirt (and hang on). I screamed and grabbed my son.”
The animal slid away. She turned to a zookeeper and asked if he’d seen what she had. His reply: “She always does that. She hates my guts.”
She wrote a letter to David Anderson, the zoo director at the time, about the incident and canceled her membership. She said she never got a reply.
*****
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/27/MN39U4TQ5.DTL
I have the feeling The City and The Zoo Society are going to be on the hook for some heavy civil damages.
Here is another report of a tiger escaping from the same enclosure:
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Another tiger did jump the mote in the San Francisco zoo in the 1960’s. It was a Bengal Tiger named Mike. This story was on a local, independent SF news program (KRON TV Ch. 4) on Friday, December 28th, 2007.
They interviewed a retired zoo worker who had pictures of Mike, the Bengal Tiger.
One day to their surprise there was Mike walking along the top of the mote wall, but behind the short fence. This was the same mote/enclosure that Tatiana was in.
They yelled to him to get back down and he soon jumped into his enclosure again. Their solution was to put water in the mote. And the water remained until Mike (400 lbs) was no longer in the exhibit.
Then the water was drained!
http://pod01.prospero.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?msg=24550.53&nav=messages&webtag=mn-comments
Here's one for ya, Mollinedo, who took over in early 2004, said that he asked staff members after Tuesday's attack whether any big cat had ever jumped the moat or escaped the grotto, and no one could recall anything like that happening.
These are two different stories from two different people. One story is from the 1960s and the other is from 1997.
I am sure this is a coordinated effort between the two witnesses to discredit the zoo. [/sarc]
“For me, it was when the swingsets disappeared from the schools.”
I remember when the seats were wood with metal fittings.
I got whacked in the head more than once, too. But I’m still perfectly norbal.
One made the papers and that person probably needs exposure The other is a hearsay thing from a blog. Nothing to report here.
>>>Nothing to report here.<<<
Here are two more accounts of tigers jumping that moat:
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But escaping from an enclosure at the zoo is not beyond the ability of a Siberian tiger, according to a retired longtime keeper and other zoo veterans interviewed by The Chronicle.
And many people who worked at the zoo knew it, the keeper said.
The keeper, who spent decades at the zoo and asked not to be publicly identified, said he got the word about Siberian tigers - and the apparently inadequate 12 1/2-foot-high moat wall that protects the public from them - in a most dramatic fashion, not long after he began working at the zoo.
“I was putting a sign up in front of the tiger exhibit, with my butt hanging over the edge,” said the former keeper. “The cat was pacing back and forth at the bottom of the grotto.”
The keeper said one of his more seasoned colleagues happened by, grabbed him by the belt loop and jerked him back, away from the edge.
“He shared the secret that people knew - the cat could jump up and take me down,” the keeper said.
And well known in zoo lore is the story about an entomologist who, as a teenage science student in the late 1950s, visited the tiger grotto with former zoo director Carey Baldwin to see if the enclosure was secure enough to contain the tiger.
“Mr. Baldwin had been told by one of the zookeepers that the tiger might be able to escape by jumping across the moat and onto the flowerbed between the public guard rail and the moat,” the entomologist, David Rentz, recalled in a posting on his Web log.
“We got a large piece of meat and tied it to a long bamboo pole and approached the tiger enclosure. We were at the other end of the bamboo pole - about 15 feet away from the meat. Baldwin held the pole at the edge of our side of the moat. Once the tiger saw it, he literally flew across the moat from his position on the other side, grabbed the meat, and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement.
“It happened so quickly that it was hard to believe what we had seen,” Rentz said Saturday in a telephone interview from his home in Queensland, Australia. “It scared the hell out of me. It scared the hell out of both of us.
“Then Mr. Baldwin closed the tiger’s access to the outside - supposedly forever,” Rentz wrote on his Web log.
****
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/29/MN00U6PR7.DTL&feed=rss.news
some animals are SAFER in a zoo than in the wild...
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