It seems to me that if you spend your time with animals that have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution telling them that big, slow animals are possible prey items, you have to know that eventually one of them will forget that it’s your friend.
To say that it won’t happen if you do it right is just not possible. There is some point where the odds are not in your favor. Can even experienced trainers spend a million hours handling tigers without an attack attempt? No. So there must be some sort of odds that eventually will come back to get you. The question is just when it will happen. Unfortunately, all Roy had was microphone, not a stout stick or something to block the animal with.
To say that the situation can be handled perfectly forever is like the situation that Richard Feynman found at NASA. They acted like there was almost no chance that the space shuttle could explode, because it hadn’t done it before. Some were even in favor of doing away with some safety inspections. After all, they hadn’t found anything the other times.
Think if you really believe that a million man-hours can be spent driving in public without a major accident. There’s no way. We all know it and do our best, but there’s no way there isn’t a fatality every week in a major city.