Tatiana, Monster of the Week?
I've been reading the comments at the San Francisco Chronicle, scanning headlines at google news and now this from radaronline.com:
Tatiana the Tiger
Long before there was Freddy Kruger, Alien, or Predator, there were tigers, nature's boogeymen. Montecore (the tiger that mauled Siegfried's Roy. Tigra from Thundercats. Ming of Harlem. And now Tatiana.
TOO SOON? Busey's latestThis is no LOL cat. It killed one poor zoo-goer and injured several others on Christmas Day at the San Francisco Zoo. The tragic victim, 17-year-old Carlos Sousa, was probably psyched to have a day out of his relatives-and-rugrats- infested house during the Christmas holidays before he was mauled by the 350-pound Siberian (aka Amur) tiger. According to survivors and witnesses, Sousa yelled at Tatiana as it clawed at his friend Kulbir Dhaliwal, distracting the beast, which then slashed Sousa's throat. Dhaliwal and his brother Paul were able to hobble away to a café in the zoo. The tiger followed their trail of blood, but police came screaming in on dirtbikes and shot Tatiana dead as it loomed over one of the victims.
There were warnings about the four-year-old tiger's bad temper. She had attacked before, ripping the flesh off a zookeeper's arm as she reached in to feed the tiger before horrified onlookers.
This is also a blow to Gary Busey, who stars in Maneater, due to be released in early January on DVD.
Initially, officials suspected that a human helped this savage beast cross a moat surrounding its enclosure. But zoo officials have admitted their enclosures were 12.5 feet (not 18 feet as they initially claimed). By comparison, the San Diego Zoo nearby has 20-foot vertical walls on one side of its tiger exhibit and 12-foot vertical walls with inward-angling four-foot toppers on the other side. The association overseeing zoos nationwide recommends a minimum height of 16.4 feet for tiger enclosures. Go-to animal guy Jack Hannah told MSNBC that a 12.5-foot leap was "virtually impossible."
So either someone masterminded an assassination-by-tiger plot or, more likely, Tatiana was the evil Michael Jordan of tigers. Better put, she's quite literally the Monster of the Week.
Reached by phone, representatives for Siegfried Fischbacher declined comment.
No, Tatiana is not a killer tiger nor a maneater. Nor does she have a "bad temper". People have tempers, not tigers.
Tatiana acted like a tiger in the wild. She exhibited wild behaviors.
That's a sign, ironically, of a successful exhibit and a successful zoo. Save This Page
posted by Natasha @ 7:04 PM
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