According to the San Francisco Chronicle, police found a shoe and blood in an area between the gate and the edge of the animal’s 25- to 30-foot-wide moat, raising the possibility that one of the victims dangled a leg or other body part over the edge of the moat…
One zoo official insisted the tiger did not get out through an open door and must have climbed or leaped out. But Jack Hanna, former director of the Columbus Zoo, said such a leap would be an unbelievable feat and ”virtually impossible.”
Instead, he speculated that visitors could have been fooling around and might have taunted the animal and perhaps even helped it get out by, say, putting a board in the moat.
Ron Magill, a spokesman at the Miami Metro Zoo, said it was unlikely a zoo tiger could make such a leap, even with a running start.
The story is here. And I agree with what Robin Hanson is probably thinking: it was signaling behavior. Maybe from the tiger too.
Update: Here is one story, here is more, some of you rail in the comments but the initial interpretation is looking correct. Note also that the tiger, after killing the first boy, went 300 yards to track down the other two boys and not anyone else.
I agree, especially regarding the tiger’s perspective. Here is a similar story happened in China — when a boy and a drunk man tried to signal friendship, a giant panda signaled them back that he is not really huggable material http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3763362.
Too bad, in the SF case, we have no clue what the eaten guy was up to.
I love the newspaper headline — Zoo Director says Tiger Wall was too low — seems like most of the experts say that the zoo wall was fine and that the kids taunting the tiger may have caused this. This headline gives a completely different meaning than a headline of “Tiger attack victims may have aided in the attac” Yet the Times chose the headline that would imply negligence on the Zoo’s part…which is too bad. Even the Times is resorting to misleading headlines.
I went to the SF zoo and saw the tiger with my kids last Sunday.
Instead, he speculated that visitors could have been fooling around and might have taunted the animal and perhaps even helped it get out by, say, putting a board in the moat.
Maybe a board made of ice which would explain why no board was found in the moat. It melted!
Tatiana has a history:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/23/TIGER.TMP
Maybe a board made of ice which would explain why no board was found in the moat. It melted!
You’ve been reading too many “locked room” mysteries.
Can’t tigers swim?
“If the only thing standing between visitors and a mauling is 1m of dangling leg and a more-pissed-off-than-usual tiger, the enclosure is not safe.”
And if the only thing standing between my car and the drunk driving right at me is a double yellow line, the road is not safe either!
Even supposing this fanciful theory was right, it would be a grossly negligent design. A mere 10% margin of error between safety and catastrophic failure? (Do the math: the length of a human leg is about 3 feet, compared to a reported total distance of 25-30 feet). No engineer responsible for such a design could keep their job — or career.
In any case, the leg-dangling theory falls apart immediately. The tiger weighed 350 pounds!. If it latched onto the victim’s foot with its teeth (hence the shoe), the victim would have been yanked down into the moat immediately by gravity. Not even Olympic weightlifting champions could keep from falling over sideways if you attached an asymmetric 350-pound weight to one side of their body.
And then there’s some magical board? A board that would have to be at least 20 feet long and able to support the weight of a 350 lb tiger, yet could be carried by a person and smuggled past the turnstiles at the zoo entrance without anybody noticing. And it vanishes after being used. Maybe the tiger ate it.
The whole thing is preposterous on its face. It stinks to high heaven of some weasel lawyer trying to use the media to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of future prospective jury members through the media.
Tyler, I’m disappointed you didn’t take the time to think this through and merely used the story as a hook for a banal comment about signaling.
People value life TOO much these days; especially in the US. Assuming this is a freak accident I think one person dead from the millions who visit and enjoy zoos each year is just ” acceptable cost of business” to me.
Mourn it, and get on with life!
The cost of eliminating dangers with a 100% certainty is WAY too high. It’s time this was gently impressed upon people. For reasons that go far beyond zoo-safety.
This post is too close to a Darwin Award (lets poke fun at people who died in a freakish, unintelligent manner).
At this stage, it doesn’t seem right for commentators with little information to irresponsibly blame someone who can’t speak for himself.
The thing that I don’t understand is, who knows for sure what the absolute maximum amount a tiger can jump? And how exactly do they know this for sure? Is there a tiger combine?
If it’s just some guy in a zoo dangling food up high and see how high the tiger will jump to get it, that doesn’t necessarily provide the answer, because there’s going to be a big difference between that and how high it jumps when it’s angry, full of tiger adrenalin, and desperate to get out. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one (currently alive) has actually seen a tiger jump as high as it possibly can under all circumstances.
I’ve heard different reports about how high the wall really is, and I’ve heard that the moat is a dry moat. Maybe this was just the Michael Jordan of lady tigers, and no one really knew how high the wall needs to be until we just found out?
“Don’t make me angry. You won’t like me when I’m angry.”
Jim Corbett, in one of his “Man-Eaters of Kumaon” stories, tells of building a gun platform high up in a tree to lay in wait for a man-eating tiger. In the middle of the night the tiger came and started jumping up to the platform, trying to get at Corbett. He got a claw onto the platform but couldn’t pull it down. After shooting the tiger, Corbett measured the height of the platform from the ground at over 18 feet.
U got it Andrew: six sigma happens!
Perfect. When they make zoo’s they should declare: “For every 1, 000,000 ppl that visit we expect one to die because of a factor to expensive to remedy”
Be rational about risk, people!
What do the two survivors say happened?
Just a technicality: The enclosure is designed to restrain a tiger. Period. Not just an “untaunted” tiger.
Tyler, what if the monkeys in the enclosure next door had joined in the taunting act?
You know what is pathetic: none of these news agencies can be bothered to visit the zoo and figure out the dimensions of this enclosure. We have a 12 1/2 foot wall and a 25-30 foot moat. Are we talking about the wall outside the moat? Is the wall 12 1/2 feet tall from the bottom of the moat? Or is it 12 1/2 feet tall from ground level of the enclosure? If its the former, once the tiger is in the moat, it seems like it could probably get out. If its the latter and the moat is reasonably deep, now the tiger has to leap 25 feet across and 12 feet up to get out. These are pretty different circumstances. It would be nice if we had the basic facts here.
Andrew: Actually, six sigma happens much less often than people think. What happens is that Gaussians are often very poor approximations to the tails of real distributions.
Raul: That is what will happen, but it is the marketplace that will determine the value of a life, not your personal preference for a not-too-high value. As societies get richer, the value will get higher, much to your apparent consternation. Right now, the lawsuit marketplace in the U.S. will put the value at $10M or so, and zoos and other participants will decide how often they want to pay that. Given the relatively small cost with which the SF zoo could have met the established standard, it probably makes more sense for them to say “let’s take a look at our engineering practices” than to just say “well whoop-tee-do, shit happens”.
The diagram clears up any mystery. The tiger only had to leap upwards 12 1/2 feet.
Tigers can jump that high! We’ve known that since at least 2004.
This is dramatically demonstrated in the YouTube video previously posted by elambend, which is a first-person view of a tiger leaping on top of an elephant to attack its human riders.
There’s no mystery here anymore. The wall was too low, the tiger jumped out.
I dunno. The quote is from Vivek Menon, Executive Director of the Wildlife Trust of India. I presume he knows his elephants.
And one more thing.
If you get a knock at the door,
And it’s the panther…
Don’t anther.
Anon (presumably Raul): I don’t regard you as a monster at all, I just think your arithmetic is way off. The evidence is that one person will be eaten over the 25-year life of this enclosure, costing the zoo $10M; that amortizes to $400K/year. (No fair counting other zoos in the statistics, because most of them probably have enclosures that actually meet the accepted standards.) It probably would have cost $100K to make the wall 4′ higher; that amortizes to $4K/year. You would have to value a life at just 1/100th of the current market value for it not to make sense, in purely rational accounting terms, for the zoo to build a safer enclosure.
You can certainly argue that market failures make the observed market price of a life suspect, but you have yet to present any evidene beyond personal opinion as to what the magnitude or even the direction of the error is.
I should qualify that last statement a bit: the failure rate for scenarios that are easily foreseeable and easily preventable at minimal one-time effort and cost should be zero.
One reason it’s so hard to prevent mishaps in complex systems is because there are so many possible failure modes and many of them are difficult to discover or predict until they happen. It takes a certain amount of imagination to foresee the WTC collapsing because of fire melting steel in a scenario where all the sprinkler pipes have been severed, or a Concorde’s tires kicking up runway debris and puncturing a fuel tank to start a fire, although the hindsight fallacy might make us think otherwise after the fact. There are entire mailing lists like the well-known RISKS-DIGEST that exist solely to figure out and raise awareness of obscure risk scenarios.
A moat on the other hand, is a simple system with a blindingly obvious failure mode: don’t let the critter jump out. Since tigers don’t burrow and you can’t claw through concrete regardless, it’s hard to even think of any other failure mode, barring a massive earthquake or terrorism.
Lions, maybe. Rhinos and elephants are non-carnivorous and can’t jump very high. Adult chimps on the other hand are incredibly strong and extremely vicious and very clever… better not spare any expense there. The chimps you see hamming it up on TV are all babies.
The really prohibitive cost though is upgrading the black swan pond.
Here are some answers to two questions. How was the tiger taunted? Reports said that items were thrown at the tiger by the young men. What are the two survivors saying? Nothing. They are refusing to cooperate at all. They refused at first to even name their dead friend. They were hostile to doctors and to police. They also have a history of trouble making and are actually due shortly in court for other problems. The dead man was supposedly their good friend. But they and their families are refusing to speak to the family of the dead man as well.
A picture of a jumping tiger (from a lolcats site, of all places). Sure looks like its front claws are at least 12 feet above the ground.
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