Tiger, Tiger burning bright
As far as I’m concerned, San Diego is not paying enough attention to this tiger homicide story, Union-Tribune front page story or no front page story. Since I have a bit of a tiger story obsession (after covering the story of the man who raised a tiger in Harlem in 2003). The short version of the tale is that on Christmas day, a tiger leapt the wall of its enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo to attack Carlos Sousa Jr., 17, and his two buddies, Kulbir and Paul Dhaliwal, 23 and 19, respectively. Here’s a run down of the facts culled from multiple news sources:
* The tiger, Tatiana, is 4-year-old, 350-pound Siberian tiger with a nasty reputation.
• Tatiana leapt out of the cage to attack one brother Kulbir. Sousa yelled at the tiger to distract it, and ended up getting mauled himself.
• The two brothers fled to the cafe. To quote the Associated Press, “After killing the teenager, the tiger followed a trail of blood left by Kulbir Dhaliwal about 300 yards to the cafe, where it mauled both men, police said. “
• Police responded to the cafe, where they found Tatiana sitting next to one of the brothers. When the brother yelled “help me, help me!” the tiger started attacking him again. (Note to victims of tiger attacks: Play dead. Zoo tigers will not eat you, since they are well fed. But they like to make sure their victims are deceased.)
• The police distracted the tiger with flood lights, and then they gunned it down.
• Police found a shoe print on the bars of the fence outside enclosure. They’re looking to see if it matches any of the victims’ shoes. The San Francisco police chief, Heather Fong, denied rumors of a bloody shoe found inside the enclosure.
• The Dhaliwal brothers have both been arrested in the last year for being drunk and high in public. Both men resisted arrest at the zoo scene, but I haven’t seen anything about whether they were sober at the time.
• The tiger is also no innocent abroad. Last December she mauled a zoo keeper.
• The wall of the enclosure was four feet lower than national zoo standards, at only 12.5 feet, but tiger experts quoted in newspaper accounts are generally surprised that Tatiana managed to vault the 25-foot moat and still clear the fence.
• The San Francisco Zoo director, Manuel Mollinedo, has a bad record for animal escapes. When he ran the Los Angeles Zoo, there were 12 escapes including a gorilla and a snow leopard.
As for me, I take the long view. Can you imagine, 10 years from now, being Sousa’s mom and having to tell people about how your son was killed by a tiger? I think people will laugh and ask her how he really died. I mean, who gets killed by a tiger?
Benazir Bhutto got killed by a tiger. I shit you not. She was riding around in a lightly armored vehicle. They say it was that she got concussed when her head slammed into the roof of the car – well, duh, it got slammed there by a fucking tiger.
Could Pervez Musharaf have built that wall a meter taller? Sure he could have. But that’s not the point. God damn Benazir Bhutto and her tiger-taunting. Goes and stands up out of her sunroof and shoots a spit-wad at a quarter-ton predator with great, huge claws and gnashing, four-inch saber teeth.
Fuck her. Seriously. Fuck Benazir Bhutto in the neck. Challenge patriarchal Islam orthodoxy all you want. I’m not impressed. Fuck around with a tiger and see where that gets ya.
If my fat 15 pound cat can from the ground, scale an 8 foot fence, I don’t know why it’s surprising that tatiana was able to get over 12.5 feet.
Question is, darlin’, why do you have a 15-pound cat? In fact, weighed it an ounce, why would one have a cat? If you die in your house, the fucker will eat you.
In my column on the incident this week, I question the argument that it is always necessary to use lethal force to take down an escaped zoo animal and I point out that the loss of a rare endangered Siberian tiger–like the loss of Sousa–is also a tragedy. It’s still puzzling to me that none of the continuing mainstream press coverage contextualizes the incident by highlighting or even mentioning the fate of Siberian Tigers. Imagine if Sousa were one of the last members of a vanishing human tribe. For more info. on tigers, check out my Oct. 10, 2006 column on last year’s tiger habitat survey:
http://sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/presently_tense/4905/
See Rosemary, I have the same situation – my 8 pound furball can standing broad jump (standing, I tell you!) atop a 6 foot half-wall. Even with the 30 foot moat, it sure seems that 20 feet – let alone 12.5 – is not high enough.