Where is the education of respecting the animals when visiting a zoo.

Are parents so ignorant as to let the children tease the animals and let them do whatever they want??? What kind of parents are they???

How is this taunting the tiger. I understand that this could piss the tiger off, but people do this all the time at a zoo. People wave and yell to get the animals to look towards a camera, kids climb on rails to get closer looks. I dont think the victims are angels, but still think the zoo are mostly responsible. And before anyone starts, weather an animal should be in captivity or not is not the topic.

The tiger saw and heard all types of things.......every day.

Also..people seem to forget that this tiger was aggressive in the past...during a NON-confrontational event.

I think that this was a bad incident all the way around that could have been prevented had the zoo enforced it's closing time policies,corrected its animal enclosures deficiencies and had asked the men to leave when it was apparent they were rowdy and disturbing the animals.

Your dogs bites somebody you let in your house....YOU are responsible for it.
Regardless of what they did (or didn't do) to provoke it.

2. The three morons that thought doing this was "fun" and "harmless" It shows what dumb@ss's people are raising these days. Unfortunately the fellow morons like these three think the kids did nothing wrong so the only hope is further natural selection to get rid of those morons.

3. The parents. I dare not to even call them parents because if they were parents those kids wouldn't have gone to a zoo drunk and stoned and acting like idiots. Real parents teach kids respect. What they did was the poster example of lack of respect.

In my experience, in my visits to zoos, people have enough common sense to know antagonizing the animals is neither acceptable nor wise.

Feeding time is often a confrontational event, in the view of a wild animal.

That doesn't excuse the actions of the men,

In my experience, kids and adults yell and wave their hands to get the attention of animals to see their faces or to take a picture.

True. So ther zoo should have made damn sure the zoo keeper was safe.

But if thye did mistreat them, (not proven yet, remember that)

that does not excuse the zoo for not having proper protection.

The cage and nothing else was wrong. If the cage was right this would never have happened.

There is quite a difference between the noise a regular visitor makes, which a zoo animal would be used to, and the actions taken by these particular men, which included climbing on the rails and throwing things at the tiger.

Based on what I have read, the person feeding the tiger was being careless. I still haven't seen any description of the severity of the attack. Unless you have access to more information than I have, for all we know the attack was just the tiger taking a swipe at the person to get at the food.

That statement came from the zoo's media department,which has since been discredited.

At this point....I don't see where blaming the victims does anything other than show a lack of empathy for your fellow human beings.

Tell me...do you go to the cancer ward and laugh at the dying ex-smokers?

Tell me... do you have to take someone's statements and then take them to an exagerated extreme conclusion to try to bolster your argument?

There is quite a difference between the noise a regular visitor makes

Actually, at least one of the men has admitted to it.

climbing on the rails and throwing things at the tiger.

Jennifer Miller, who was at the zoo with her husband and two children that ill-fated Christmas afternoon, said she saw four young men at the big-cat grottos - and three of them were teasing the lions a short time before the tiger’s bloody rampage that killed 17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr.The boys, especially the older one, were roaring at them. He was taunting them,” the San Francisco woman said. “They were trying to get that lion’s attention. … The lion was bristling, so I just said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here’ because my kids were disturbed by it.”

She said Sousa - whom she later recognized from his photo in the newspaper - was not heckling. The Chronicle contacted Miller after learning that she and her family had seen the young men at the zoo Christmas Day.

An organisation cages some of the most lethal animals in the world, then charges the public to come and look at them without any supervision. There is no presumption of "good behavour" from the public. The cage has to hold *especially* in the case where members of the public are being jerks. They're gonna do that no matter what and you absolutely have to design around it.


The cage and nothing else was wrong. If the cage was right this would never have happened.

Sorry. I disagree with your statement that 'nothing else was wrong'.

Stupid, stoned, drunk teenagers were wrong. Stupid, stoned, drunk kids lying about instigating an animal attack is wrong. Parents that weren't concerned about their stupid, stoned, drunk kids until they turned up maimed or dead is wrong. There is nothing 'right' about bad, irresponsible behavior either from the kids or their parents. The zoo is at fault, but so are the kids.

I climbed into a pig pen once when I was a kid and teased one of them thinking " Their pigs man! I mean how much damage can they do??? I learned a rough lesson..

this is the reason i only taunt the weak and small animals when i go to the zoo...
i/e, flamingos, spider monkeys, prarie dogs, lizards, occasional ant eater, etc.