Tiger attack makes case for closing zoos

Lose the zoos, close them now, except for "sanctuary" zoos. The Siberian tiger Tatiana is the victim here. Evidence suggests the Dhaliwal brothers and Carlos Sousa Jr. were tormenting and otherwise provoking the captive predator, possibly with slingshots, possibly drunkenly, before Sousa was killed and the brothers mauled after the cat broke captivity. I'm not saying today's zoos are essentially inhumane places for animals, even wild animals, to live. They're not, usually. But they are at all times such as Christmas Day at the San Francisco Zoo. What's inhumane and sticks in my craw is that zoos draw the ignorant, the bored and the mean-spirited as well as the safer class of clientele. And the animals are at the mercy of the former. A lot of early U.S. zoos grew out of circuses. Traveling circus vehicles would break down, the carnies would filter off and the animals would be left behind to be exploited by the first huckster to turn up. This happened in Atlanta and North Carolina, for example. P.T. Barnum exhibited a slave woman while on the way to procuring African elephants, establishing the Greatest Show on Earth and coining his trenchant motto - there's a sucker born every minute. Zoo animals are spectacles, live beings but freakishly unlike humans in appearance and behavior, monstrously unlike even domestic animals. Monkeys are a good example. Look at the dumb monkey, he's like us but can't talk or understand us. Hey monkey ! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! All he thinks about is bananas. The irony is choking. Folsom Zoo Sanctuary houses only animals who've come through a life-threatening episode - starvation, or serious injury or abuse. Its tigers are protected from harassment. Such institutions originated completely outside the P.T. Barnum paradigm, and are exempt from my call to close spectacle-type zoos.The tiger enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo has been declared a crime scene as investigators review clues that may indicate Tatiana was initially taunted by her victims or was aided in her escape. Clues include a bloody shoe inside the enclosure, and pine cones and sticks that might have been thrown at the tiger. The director of the zoo says it is likely that Tatiana was provoked. He said that: "Somebody created a situation that really agitated her and gave her some sort of a method to break out. A couple of feet dangling over the edge could possibly have done it." Pinecones and sticks were found which might have been thrown at Tatiana, and which, it is said, could not have landed there naturally. The Dhaliwal brothers have been "hostile" to the police following the attack. They initially refused to identify themselves or Carlos Sousa to the police, and they refused to give interviews to the police until two days after the attack. As of press time, the brothers have not publicly said what they saw or what they were doing at the grotto. The blogosphere is almost univocal in dissing the idea the incident could have happened without human provocation. Blogger Drock, who thinks he's smart, says the tiger couldn't have used Sousa's exposed body to lever upwards - too heavy, he says. Not if two young, strong, adrenaline-juiced friends had hold of Sousa, dragging him upwards - to safety, they would have assumed.Three times as many Siberian tigers are in zoos world-wide as live free in Siberia, the Los Angeles station KNBC-TV reported. The species is endangered, for crying out loud, and now one more is gone, shot dead by timid police, and because of what? I must agree wholeheartedly with blogger Anne, who wrote, "I don't have any pity for the humans here at all -- the world has plenty of young men willing to do careless, thoughtless things that will endanger others as well as themselves, but too few tigers."The Telegraph's Roger Phelps can be reached at rogerp@goldcountrymedia.com, or post a comment at folsomtelegraph.com