The article said they spent a quarter mil on security improvements after the last incident. I think the staff built themselves a bunker.
But no surveilance. :smack:
cnn is reporting that one of the men may have put a foot or leg into the tiger enclosure. a shoe and blood was found between the moat and fence. speculation is that the tiger may have gotten hold of the limb and got out and tracked down the 3 men.
i must say if it turns out the tiger was helped out by the young men that changes the picture totally. the tiger version of the “binky the bear” incident.
hearing the father of the young man that was killed is just heartbreaking.
Ooh, that would be a gruesome escape, basically using a guy’s leg like a tree branch and clawing its way up and out. Still seems far fetched, though.
Y’know, gallows humor used to mean making jokes about your own misfortune, large animal attack or imminent death. That takes some courage.
So, it still is, and examples contained herein are *not *gallows humor.
It’s hard to believe that they didn’t think a surveillance camera would be a good idea. Not only for making sure that no one was provoking the big cats but also in case something did happen they would be able to spot it and respond quickly.
From the article Contra linked:
Yeah, but look out for those landsharks!
Guy must have had a heck of a grip on the fence to hang on while a 350 pound tiger was shinnying up his leg!
Maybe he called out to his buddies and they held onto him to try to pull him out, which gave the tiger enough traction to climb up. Just speculation on the physics of how it could have happened.
I have the precious gift of being able to laugh at the misfortune of others.
Yeah. Some news stories described the tiger tracking a trail of blood to the cafe, suggesting that the dead guy near the cage might not have been the man-ladder.
Wonder which of the injured guys was missing a shoe?
Hard to imagine what must have been going through the cops’ minds. I would guess they don’t get too much training/experience tracking large game through an underlit zoo at night… :eek:
An excerpt from Contrapuntal’s link:
I wish people would learn to cite some other lawsuit when referring to frivolous legal actions. Here is just one of several websites that give the real facts of the scalding coffee case. The woman was seriously injured, the company was wilfully negligent, and special interests continue to work to keep alive the myth that many lawsuits in America each year are frivolous.
I pointed this out in post #72 above. But it’s worth repeating.
And, for that matter, helping to figure out what went wrong after the fact.
Actually, I was thinking about the RFID tags currently being used by warehouses to track inventory and by retailers to flag stolen goods on the way out the door, among other uses. Here, you could tag a dangerous animal with a passive RFID, and then set up a monitor in the very center of the enclosure that sets off an alarm if the tag gets farther away than the edge of the cage.
Then all you’d need to worry about is Wayne Knight turning off the power to steal some tiger jizz.
Funny how these days people complain about there being too many security cameras or none at all.
Virginia, your little friends are wrong, there IS a Sanity Clause…
No, just Tiger Claws.
I think you’re comparing apples and oranges, here.
For me, the reason I think that a lack of security cameras is a flaw at the zoo is that in this situation the lack of a remote means to search the zoo probably hindered the zoo personnel’s efforts to contain the escaped animal. Which means that the lack of security cameras actually factored in to preventing the protection of zoo patrons.
The secondary use of the cameras in this situation would have been to get a record of what the tiger and the patrons had been doing just before the escape. Which, if they had a record of the teens taunting the tiger might prove to be extenuating circumstances to some people’s minds come the lawsuits that most of us believe will be following.
Ergo, in this situation, the surveillance would have been effectively protective in its purpose, and a minimal impact on the rights of zoo patrons. FTM, the recent mall shooting had a surveillance system being used to coordinate with law-enforcement, to tell them where the shooter was.
Where security cameras get the most flak these days, ISTM, are when they’re being used as an enforcement tool by law-enforcement, or the military. Curfew cameras in urban areas, for example. Or systems like this one mentioned in this article.
The protective uses of surveillance cameras seem to me to be unexceptional, it’s when they get used to allow the state to monitor public areas, especially those public areas with unrestricted access, that people get concerned.