Toronto Zoo investigates after woman jumps tiger’s fence to retrieve hat
Looks like she didn’t reduce the gene pool, but still…
She just missed the requirements for candidacy. She’s definitely an idiot, though.
When I worked at the LA Zoo a long time ago, we had someone decide that they would go swimming in the moat that was in place between the lion enclosure and the fence. Everyone “knows” lions don’t swim, right? (Ha!) Unfortunately for the guy in the moat doing his neener-neener dance, it turns out that lions swim just fine when there’s something interesting in the water. I believe he died.
The woman is an imbecile but there was another fence between her and the tiger. Boy did that tiger look interested in her!
With the caveat that wild animals are unpredictable and can obviously be extremely dangerous, it’s quite possible that the tiger, who was undoubtedly well-fed but likely quite bored, was nothing more than curious about an unusual occurrence in what was otherwise another humdrum day of just lying around. 
I thought that tiger seems very annoyed. That wasn’t only curiosity it displayed. Yes, there was a fence separating the cat and the woman. Obviously the woman had a lot more faith in the fence than anyone else had. Me? I have my doubts that fence could have kept the tiger in if the tiger REALLY wanted to go over it. It wasn’t an 8 foot tall one, yanno?
Of course being a wild animal, the tiger might have decided to satisfy its curiosity and boredom by opened this new thing up and seeing what was inside.
It’s hard to tell which fence is which from the video, but it looks to me like the inner fence is about twice the height of the one she jumped, and angles inwards at the top.
So, not quite such a moron as someone who jumps right into the tiger cage, but yelling man definitely has a point - she is a bad example to everyone’s kids.
That must have been one hell of an important, irreplaceable hat to be worth risking her life or horrific injury for. Perhaps that hat saved her whole family from a burning building once. Or possibly that hat donated the kidney that saved her infant’s life. Maybe that hat had just figured out how to cure and prevent all cancer and they had come to the zoo to celebrate on their way to deliver the key research to the relevant facility.
I don’t want to scold anyone, but we should reserve our judgement until all the facts about this hat come in.
Reminds me of the time a couple of young idiots decided to go swimming in the polar bear exhibit at Lincoln Park Zoo. Two Darwin Award winners and a couple of polar bears who got to enjoy some new playtoys and take a nap afterward with full stomachs.
The only reason the hat woman didn’t wind up similar was that second fence.
While people have been killed entering bear enclosures, I can’t find any verification of this (although a worker cleaning a cage was killed by a black bear at Lincoln Park Zoo in 1945).
You’d probably have to dig through Chicago newspaper archives, it happened back in the '80’s before everything was on line. I have found finding confirmation of stuff prior to 1995 can be difficult on line unless someone has enough interest to make a web site on it.
Although you can find the 1986 cow fucking incident at the Lincoln Park Farm-in-the-Zoo that inspired this timeless toon, though I know there was more than one in the 1980’s.
You might be getting confused with a couple of incidents at NYC zoos during the 80s.
Don’t think the tiger was hoping for a meal. It looked more like a territorial-type “what the fuck are you doing in my enclosure?” display. Still, they ought to haul that woman away and beat some common sense into her.
You folks have it all wrong. With the recent death of the “tiger whisperer”, this particular lady was merely announcing her candidacy, but then changed her mind. She was just throwing her hat into the ring.
“…And the smile on the face of the tiger.”
I found this news story from 1987.
There was the Australian tourist who was chomped by a polar bear at the Anchorage zoo, in 1994
Polar Bear Zoo Attack - YouTube And ad runs first, but it’s one of the better videos of this incident, with explantions on what happened.
She got too close to the cage to take a picture. It was an idiotic thing to do, but she partailly redeemed herself afterwards by taking all the blame, saying she’d been stupid to think that just because the bear looked asleep that things would be okay.
This was national news back when. Later on there was film of the bear carrying her shoe around in his cage. A local Ford dealer had an ad with two polar bears, one carrying a shoe, and the other saying “I said I wanted a Taurus, not a tourist!” And there as a parody of the song “All That She Wants”, that went “All Binky wants, is another tourist, to munch a little…”
As I noted in a closely related post, even if the tiger was neither hungry nor especially vicious, getting close to it could STILL result in a horrible death.
Ever see two adult tigers at play? Their kind of “play” would probably kill me, even if the tiger didn’t mean any real harm. A playful tiger swat could easily break my neck, and a love bite from a tiger might well sever major arteries. You don’t want to get close to ANY tiger, even a nice one.
Yes, that is possible - I’m relying on 30 year old memory, after all, and my memory isn’t perfect.