Fear of the Animal Planet. Jason Hribal
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to San Francisco in 2005. She was, at the time, considered to be a sparkling new addition to the zoo’s tiger exhibition. Such embracing attitudes did not last long, especially after Tatiana managed to scale the twelve-foot high wall of her enclosure and escape. There had been these teenagers. They were yelling obscenities, waving their arms, and possibly throwing stuff at her. One visitor described how these young men had been doing the same exact thing with the nearby lions, and that the lions were pissed off. The woman gathered up her family and promptly left the area. Angry lions are scary, even when they are tucked behind bars. Tigers can be even more frightening.
Tatiana went directly after the men who had been taunting her and ripped one of them to pieces. The other two ran. For twenty minutes, Tatiana roamed the zoo grounds. She was presented with many opportunities to attack park employees and emergency responders. She could easily have gone after other visitors. But Tatiana was singular in her purpose. She wanted to find those two remaining teenagers, and she would do just that at the Terrace Cafe. With a dismembering taking place, police encircled the spot and shined their lights onto the tiger. Tatiana turned and approached. They shot her dead.
Zoos and circuses have a standard operating procedure in dealing with the aftermath of such incidences of violence by captive animals. Step One is to claim that escapes and attacks are very rare. They almost never happen. The general public has nothing to worry about. Journalists have nothing to investigate. Yet, we have to ask, is this true? It was one year earlier when Tatiana attacked a trainer. With families watching from about four feet away, the tiger squeezed her paws through the narrow bars of the cage, clawed onto a keeper’s arm, and pulled it in for a bite. “While we were heading out,” a parent lamented, “I could still hear . . . screaming.” San Francisco officials would state that it was “the only injury of its kind that has happened at the zoo.” This was not true. Tinkerbelle the elephant had been involved in a series of dust ups with zoo employees. Then there was Fatima, a female Persian leopard. In 1990, she jumped onto the back of a trainer and bit his neck. “I thought the leopard was going to kill him,” one onlooker noted. “He was screaming, ‘Help me, help me; get him off, get him off.’ I was scared. That was not the kind of thing I expected to see at the zoo.” If only the visitor had known.
In the past two decades, in the United States alone, captive tigers have killed ten people and injured countless more. A partial list would include the 2008 attack on a trainer at the Hawthorn Corporation. Hawthorn is a leasing agency and training facility located outside of Chicago, Illinois. Its fifty tigers are loaned out throughout the year to various circuses and entertainment enterprises. In 2007, it was Berani, a Sumatran tiger, who chomped onto a trainer’s head at the San Antonio Zoo. A year before that it was a tiger named Enshala at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida. Enshala escaped her enclosure and went after a veterinarian. Lowry’s ten-member weapons team, trained by local police, assembled. Many zoos, in fact, have these armed squads whose sole purpose is to respond to escapes and attacks. As for Enshala’s fate, she would die after being hit by four shotgun blasts.
In 2005, it would be back to Hawthorn—where a tiger attacked a touring visitor. In 2004, the Cole Brothers Circus had an escapee run into the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens. His name was Apollo, a white Bengal tiger, and he would startle picnic-goers and cause a five car pile-up on the Jackie Robinson Parkway. In 2003, another white Bengal made the news. It was during a Siegfried and Roy show in Las Vegas, when Montecore clamped down on the neck of Roy Horn and dragged him off stage. Roy barely survived the encounter. That same year a Sumatran tiger named Castro attacked his trainer at the Sacramento Zoo. The man would also survive, but not by much. In 2000, an Amur tiger escaped during a fundraiser at Zoo Boise in Idaho. “Feast for the Beast,” as the party was publicized, was almost just that. The tiger chased down a patron and began chewing on her. Police ended up shooting the woman but missed the cat.
In 1998, it was Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus’s turn for trouble. While stopped in St. Petersburg, Florida in January, several tigers were brought into the center of the ring for a photography session. Trainer Richard Chipperfield was in charge. At some point in the photo session Arnold, a four year-old tiger, decided to grab a hold of Chipperfield’s head with his teeth. Only after being whipped and sprayed with a fire extinguisher did the tiger let go. But the damage had been done. Arnold was returned to his cage, and the trainer’s brother, Graham, executed the tiger with five shots. Graham himself had been attacked several years earlier by a group of performing lions. As for Ringling Brothers, their problems would continue. In November of that same year, another tiger would escape and take a run at a trainer. It also ended violently.
Our list of confrontations could go on. We could add to those incidents that happened outside of the United States. There was, for example, a tiger attack in Moscow in February of 2006. Asked afterwards about whether the Russian circus was going to kill the tiger involved, the trainer responded with honesty. “If we were to shoot every tiger that attacks us, there wouldn’t be any remaining.” Not so lucky was the fugitive tiger from a Polish show. In March of 2000, this animal fled into the streets of Warsaw. A circus veterinarian tried to stop him and they tussled. Police opened fire and killed both man and tiger.
Also, we have not even begun to address the activities of other big cats: lions, jaguars, cougars and cheetahs. The latter, for instance, seems to be particularly adept at the art of escape. Olivia the cheetah climbed a fence, bounced off a tree, and cleared a wall to get out her San Antonio Zoo enclosure. She roamed the visitor-filled park for twenty minutes. Halala scrambled over a twelve-foot wide moat and a twelve-foot high wall at the St. Louis Zoo. Keepers had no idea how she did it. At the Nashville Zoo, an unidentified male cheetah would spend ten hours on the loose before being captured. And who could forget what happened in October of 2008. Two cheetahs, while being transferred to the Memphis Zoo, escaped from their cages and strolled about the cargo hold of their Boeing 757 passenger flight. Indeed, such incidences occur far more often than the zoos and circuses would lead us to believe.
Step Two in the standard operating procedure is to deny agency. The key words to remember are “accident,” “wild,” and “instinct.” The tiger injured her trainer by accident. She is, after all, a wild animal. She was just following her instinct. Repeat these lines enough and people will believe you. Yet, when we begin to explore these incidents more deeply, we discover that the zoos and circuses are deceiving us once again. Tatiana targeted a group of teasers. She could have escaped the enclosure anytime, but she needed motivation. She could have attacked others, but she wanted revenge. A frequent visitor to the zoo told a reporter of witnessing a similar attempt by another tiger in 1997. The unnamed female had just missed scaling over the wall. Evidently, she wanted at the nearby keeper. As the man would explain to those around him, “She always does that. She hates my guts.” The veterinarian at Lowry Park admitted to the same thing after Enshala was killed. “This cat hates me.” Remember the case of Fatima, the leopard who jumped onto the back of a San Francisco trainer. Schoolchildren told a newspaper reporter that only seconds before the attack the man washing out her cage had sprayed Fatima with water. Or how about Montecore. She had been performing for over six years at a clip of eight shows a week. The night of the attack she refused to obey a command and the trainer threatened her. She bit the man’s arm. When the trainer hit her in the head with a microphone, she grabbed him by the throat. In each of these scenarios, the actions were neither accidental nor instinctual. These cats attacked for a reason.
Consider the case of captive elephants. These animals have the capability of inflicting large-scale fatalities. They are big, strong, and fast. Yet, when given the opportunity to plow through a crowd of visitors or stomp a row of spectators, they almost never do. Instead, they target specific individuals. There is the case of Janet, a Great American Circus elephant. During her rampage in 1992, she had a group of children riding on her back. She could have easily thrown them off and killed them. But she didn’t. Janet, in point of fact, paused midway through the melee, let someone remove the children, and then continued her assault on circus employees. As to her primary motivation, that was revealed when Janet picked up a fallen object off the ground and smashed it repeatedly against a wall. The object turned out to be a bullhook.
The bullhook, or ankus, is a nasty device that the many zoos and circuses use to train their elephants. It looks like a crowbar but with a sharpened point on the curled end.