Tatiana

[mdlbear]

I've always loved zoos, and the San Francisco Zoo in particular. But it's a sadder place today. Sometime this afternoon a Siberian tiger named Tatiana somehow escaped from her cage. She killed a young man, and was attacking two more when she was shot and killed by the police. It was almost exactly a year after she mauled one of her keepers during a feeding. (News stories here and here.)

The chaoswolf "adopted" Tatiana's next-door neighbor, Tony, about a year and a half ago. We went to a feeding; I remember Tatiana vividly -- dark-striped, sleek, graceful, and restless. She had come to the zoo from Russia, like my maternal grandmother whose name was also Tatiana, though everyone called her by the diminutive, "Tanya". I always thought of Tatiana by that name, too.

I feel terribly sorry for poor, lost Tanya. The world may be a little safer today, but a creature of great beauty and a fierce, proud spirit has gone out of it.

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I saw that too. Unfortunately, fierce, proud spirits and prey animals equipped with weaponry don't always get along very well. I'm sorry for Tanya but I'm also terribly sorry for the young man she killed and the others she injured, both this time and last year. She was consistently uninterested in being tame enough for us primates to work with safely, it seems, and that is no longer a viable survival trait in most of the world. There should be places where wild things which are not interested in becoming handleable by primates can live without hurting us or vice versa, but the SF zoo isn't really one. It's made for the semi-wild, those who will accept a certain degree of direction by trained handlers and a certain degree of restraint. We can't keep in cities the ones which won't, it doesn't work.

[mdlbear]

All true. Hard to tell in advance which ones will be too wild to keep, but there must have been at least a few warning signs with Tatiana. I expect that people who work in zoos have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to their charges; it's the same kind of familiarity that causes industrial accidents elsewhere.

Walking around the zoo is still safer per passenger-mile than getting in a car or crossing the street at a busy intersection.