Tiger attacks ‘human error’
In a working zoo, carelessness and distraction are always recipes for disaster.
That’s what local experts are saying in the wake of a fatal tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas Day.
“To me, it’s very much a reminder — safety, safety, safety, safety,” said Len Mattox, curator emeritus at Sasquatch Zoo in Crestview. “It’s a big zoo with all the resources in the world. There’s no reason for it to happen unless it was human error.”
Zoos rely on workers to feed the animals and clean the cages, and it’s imperative that they follow every safety procedure, he said.
“When I was at Sasquatch Zoo, once about every three months I’d have my employees go through a drill,” said Mattox, who raised many tigers, bottle feeding them as cubs. “And if they weren’t on a dead run, I’d be on their tails. If it wasn’t right, we had to go through it again the next day.”
At the Crestview zoo, the tigers live in an 8-foot cement bedroom surrounded by a 10-foot fence that slants in at a 45-degree angle, he added.
Mattox doubts the Siberian tiger that attacked in San Francisco intended to kill a human.
“I would guess it was probably a bottle-raised baby that young curators, kids, had played with and had zero respect for man,” he said.
Mattox said the tiger likely had not been disciplined properly as a cub.
But longtime tiger trainer Josip Marcan disagrees, suggesting that the tiger had not been bottle-fed as a cub.
“The tiger did not think he was playing,” said Marcan, who owns Adriatic Animal Attractions in Ponce de Leon and trains tigers for circuses. “The tiger was doing what tigers do. It’s not the tiger’s fault. It was human error.”
Marcan, who has trained hundreds of tigers for more than half a century, said he was not surprised when he heard about the attack.
“It’s a zoo tiger,” he said. “Zoo tigers are different from circus tigers. A circus tiger is like a college graduate. A zoo tiger is like a dummy, an illiterate.”
Marcan said a circus tiger comes into contact with humans every day and, in general, is less likely to act aggressively and more likely to ignore a person in its path.
He said the Siberian is no more deadly than any other sub-species of tiger.
“Tigers are similar to people,” Marcan said. “Some people kill, some people don’t.”
The Siberian is the largest of all tigers, averaging more than 300 pounds. It also sits on the endangered species list, with only 200 to 250 left in the wild.
Officials at The Zoo Northwest Florida in Gulf Breeze would not comment on the San Francisco attack.
New Executive Director Danyelle Lantz said the likelihood of a similar escape locally is low. She also encouraged visitors to respect the barriers at a zoo because they are in place for visitors’ safety.