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MONTH: January/February 2008

Send zoo cats to sanctuaries?

SAN FRANCISCO -- Carlos Souza, 17, on Christmas Day 2007 may have meant to provoke a violent response from a San Francisco Zoo tiger named Tatiana, though that may never be known for sure. His ensuing death provoked heated global debate over the ethics of exhibiting wildlife.

Apparently making an unprecedented and unwitnessed leap from her enclosure, Tatiana killed Souza, then pursued and injured his companions Paul Dhaliwal, 19, and Kulbir Dhaliwal, 24, before police shot her in an open air café, about 300 feet from Souza's remains.

"Police believe the three people mauled by a tiger yelled and waved at the cat from atop a railing," reported Associated Press writers Lisa Leff and Terrence Chea on January 18, 2008, summarizing almost a month of investigation."

One of the two surviving victims told the father of the teenager who was killed in the attack that while the three climbed the 3-foot railing and tried to get the tiger's attention, they never threw or dangled anything into the pen, according to a search warrant affidavit. The tiger 'may have been taunted/agitated by its eventual victims,' Inspector Valerie Matthews wrote in the affidavit.

Police believe 'this factor contributed to the tiger escaping from its enclosure and attacking its victims,' Matthews wrote.

All three victims had marijuana in their systems," Leff and Chea continued, "and Paul Dhaliwal's blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit for driving, said the affidavit."

The attack was at least the 21st incident at the San Francisco Zoo since 1949 involving injuries or death to animals, staff, or the public, but it was also reportedly the first time in the 83-year history of the American Zoo Association that an animal who escaped from an AZA-accredited zoo killed a member of the public. Other members of the public who have been killed by zoo animals had in some manner entered the animals' habitats.

But the 224 AZA-accredited zoos are only about 10% of all the USDA-licensed captive wildlife viewing venues in the U.S., and may not even be 1% of all the captive wildlife exhibition sites worldwide.

Other recent attacks

In contrast to the media "feeding frenzy" following the San Francisco Zoo attack, which generated more than 100 newspaper articles within the next month, comparable incidents at non-AZA facilities around the world typically attract only local or regional notice.

For example, six days earlier, on December 19, 2007, two Bengal tigers fatally mauled Jayprakash Bezbaruah, 50, at the Assam State Zoo in Guwahati, India. Bezbaruah extended his arms into the tigers' cage to photograph one of the tigers, his wife Rupa told reporters. He apparently did not see the other tiger, who grabbed him and pulled him into the cage while his school-age eldest son Angshuman tried to pull him back. Rupa and their younger son saw the incident from too far away to help. The Assam Human Rights Commission on January 9, 2008 asked the zoo to respond to questions about visitor safety by February 26.

On December 24, 2007, one day before the San Francisco Zoo tiger attack, five-year-old Haw Qian Tong received 10 stitches on her lips after being scratched by either a puma or a spotted leopard at Zoo Negara in Malaysia. Her parents said she was attacked by the puma while standing with her back to the cage. Zoo staff said the attacking animal was the leopard. Zoo Negara director Mohamed Ngah told Jennifer Gomez of NST Online that the victim had crossed safety barriers including ornamental trees and a wire fence.

Less than one day after the San Francisco Zoo tiger attack, on December 26, 2007, a Asian elephant named Arna, traveling with the Stardust Circus in New South Wales, Australia, crushed veteran handler Ray Williams, 57, at the Yamba Showgrounds. Two weeks later the circus transferred Arna and a second Asian elephant named Gigi to the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo. Whether the elephants would stay at the zoo "is dependent on whether they pass behavioral and health assesments. There is also the matter of whether the zoo can afford to house the elephants," reported Jess Perriam of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Added Perriam, "New South Wales acting environment minister Nathan Rees says while he's open to the idea of the zoo keeping the elephants, he hopes it won't set a precedent for other circuses to expect zoos to take unwanted animals."

On January 1, 2008, six days after the San Francisco Zoo tiger attack, an 11-year-old captive-born bottlenose dolphin named Annie was asked to leap over a baton held as a hurdle by six participants at a swim-with-dolphins session at the Dolphin Academy in Curacao. In mid-leap Annie abruptly turned sideways, appearing to aim at the last woman on the dolphin's right, and hit her as well as two others. The extent of the people's injuries was not disclosed. Dolphin Academy staff reportedly confiscated the cameras of witnesses and took their film, but a video of the attack was posted by the Dutch Party for the Animals at http://you-tube.com/partijvoordedieren. Party for the Animals founder Marianne Thieme called for abolishing dolphin captivity.

Thieme's response echoed the views expressed by prominent animal advocates after the San Francisco Zoo attack.

"There is not a zoo in this country that comes close to providing tigers with the space that they need," charged PETA spokesperson Lisa Wathne, to San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Leslie Fulbright. "The San Francisco Zoo made the decision to put its elephants in a sanctuary," Wathne reminded, "and they should make the same decision for tigers."

The last San Francisco Zoo elephant was transferred to the Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary in rural northern California in March 2005.

"Because of findings that the wall around the exhibit was the wrong height, we're asking the zoo to close down that tiger pen," In Defense of Animals founder and president Elliot Katz told Patrick May and John Woolfolk of the San Jose Mercury News. "These tigers should be sent to a sanctuary and not be around the public any more," Katz said.

"The San Francisco Zoo and others around the country should do away with such exhibits," agreed Animal Defenders International program director Jennifer Blum. "Even with the best of intentions and state-of-the-art facilities, these establishments cannot provide the animals with the space and environment they truly need and deserve, and this deprivation results in mental and emotional damage."

Recalled University of Colorado emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Marc Bekoff, "A year ago Tatiana attacked a keeper. Tatiana lived for a time at the Denver Zoo, and was shipped to San Francisco because the Denver Zoo wanted to redecorate. Large carnivores simply do not belong in zoos," Bekoff wrote. "Isn't it about time that the Association of Zoos and Aquariums start investigating how to rid zoos of these animals and send them off to sanctuaries, so they can live out their lives with dignity?"

Bekoff said that some of his students had discovered during the 1990s that 20-25% percent of zoo visitors taunt the animals, especially predators such as lions and tigers.

But "When something like this happens, what you find is that it's almost never that there just was one single thing that went wrong," American SPCA science advisor Stephen Zawistowski told May and Woolfolk. "It's a cascade of things. The wall wasn't a height that was appropriate; there was an animal with a past history; there was nobody there to keep track of her; there were people harassing her. When you click down that list and they all align, you end up with a tragedy."

The San Francisco Zoo tiger and lion house moat and walls, built in 1940, are two feet shorter than the current AZA recommendations. At that time even most big cat experts were unaware that tigers can leap more than twice as far as African lions. Even so, no other tiger had ever leaped out.

No sanctuary space

Reality is that no big cat sanctuary in the U.S. and only a handful anywhere offer either substantially more space to each cat than the San Francisco Zoo, or have significantly more secure barriers to escape--and even fewer have the capacity to hold many more animals than those they already care for.

At least twice in recent years, sanctuaries have taken in large numbers of tigers who were confiscated by law enforcement, but only after more than a year apiece of preparation.

Wild Animal Orphanage, of San Antonio, Texas, in 2003 received 24 tigers who had been confiscated nearly five years earlier, after state and federal agencies moved to close the former Tigers Only Preservation Society compound in Jackson Township, New Jersey. The International Fund for Animal Welfare paid to build the tigers' new accommodations.

A year later the Performing Animal Welfare Society received 39 tigers who were seized in 2002 from Tiger Rescue founder John Weinhart, who was in February 2005 convicted of cruelty and child endangerment. These tigers' quarters were paid for by the Fund for Animals, as one of the last big Fund projects before it merged into the Humane Society of the U.S.

Several other tigers rescued from Tiger Rescue were taken to the Shambala Preserve in Acton, California, founded by actress Tippi Hedren. One of those tigers on December 3, 2007 mauled nine-year Shambala worker Chris Orr, 40.

If conditions at AZA-accredited zoos can be faulted for animal attacks, whatever is wrong at zoos would appear to be even more wrong at sanctuaries, which are significantly less regulated, are accredited--if at all--by competing organizations that among them include only a small percentage of the facilities claiming to be sanctuaries, and have markedly more fatal accidents even though they employ relatively few people and attract just a fraction as many visitors.

Among the recent sanctuary attack victims, senior caregiver Joanna Burke, 36, was killed in July 2006 by an elephant at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee.

Visitor Haley Hilderbrand, 17, was killed by a Siberian tiger in August 2005 at the Lost Creek Animal Sanctuary in Mound Valley, Kansas.

Volunteer St. James Davis lost his nose, testicles, left foot, an eye, and several fingers to a March 2005 attack by two escaped chimps at the Animal Haven Ranch sanctuary in southern California.

Cougar Bluff (Illinois) sanctuary cofounder Allison Brent Abell was killed by an African lion at the sanctuary in February 2004. Second Nature Exotic Cats Sanctuary founder William Olsen, 32, of Hennepin, Illinois, was fatally mauled by a tiger in March 2003.

Linda Bracket, 35, a volunteer at Safari Joe's Rock Creek Exotic Animal Park near Adair, Oklahoma, was fatally mauled by a tiger in April 2003. Helper Amanda Sternke, 20, was injured in the same attack. The tiger belonged to the International Wildlife Center, a Texas facility closed in 2002 due to repeated violations of animal care and zoning standards.

Also in April 2003, an African lion who escaped from a cage that had apparently been tampered with ran over and severely injured Wild Animal Orphanage founder Carol Asvestas, after Asvestas shot him with a tranquilizer dart. The lion was then killed by police.

Perennially scarce funding is the most obvious reason why sanctuary accommodations and security rarely approach zoo standards.

In September 2006, for example, nearly 250 large carnivores were in imminent jeopardy of losing their sanctuary placements just in the state of Colorado, when three of the largest sanctuaries in the U.S. simultaneously ran into crises due to loss of financial support in two cases and the death of the founder in the third.

Because of the extreme financial demands of housing and feeding large carnivores, many sanctuaries that house them become quasi-roadside zoos. Though nominally not open to the public, they depend for much of their income on hosting group tours, camera safaris, and special events, and because they can barely afford to pay staff, they often rely upon an ever changing cadre of volunteers to do most of the work.

IFAW reported in August 2006 than an 18-month investigation of 42 USDA-licensed big cat facilities in 11 states, including both roadside zoos and self-designated sanctuaries, found that most "were structurally unsound. Some had no barriers at all. Contact between big cats and young children was common. Many facilities had no attendants to handle the big cats. Some allowed children to work as attendants."

The conditions were often no safer for the animals. "Some animals were fed rotten meat and housed with dead animals, filthy water buckets, and sewage," IFAW summarized.

"There are nearly 700 USDA big cat licensees in the U.S. with the highest number of facilities in Florida, Texas and California," IFAW noted. "In the past decade, there were 13 big cat incidents in Florida, 12 in Texas, six in California, and five each in Illinois, Nevada, Minnesota, and Kansas. Since 1990, big cats have killed 13 people in the U.S. alone."

The IFAW findings followed an April 2005 report by Los Angeles Times staff writer Amanda Covarrubias that the California Department of Fish & Game, required by law to annually inspect exotic animal facilties, had in 2004 actually visited only 14 of the 338 known sites housing exotic animals.