[FEL-L] SF Zoo, finally someone speaks for the tiger

[bczion13 at aol.com]

 Hi
I agree!!
Start a petition I'll sign it! Her Life/Death should not be in vain, but help change the cruel people out there...:)
I live in San Jose,

Caryl


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Breuckman <puma at catbox.com>
To: felines-l at catbox.com
Sent: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 6:15 pm
Subject: [FEL-L] SF Zoo, finally someone speaks for the tiger










Mourning the loss of Tatiana the tiger

Patricia Briggs

Monday, March 3, 2008


As a San Francisco Zoo visitor for the past 30 years, the
heart-wrenching story of Siberian tiger Tatiana and the three young
male visitors seemed all too reminiscent of some teenage school
groups, many with boorish males, who come to the zoo for all the
wrong reasons: for teasing and laughing at the animals who are
completely at their mercy. The survivors of this event reportedly
admitted to doing just that. It is tragic that a human life was lost,
but this whole episode was colored by the context in which it
occurred.

When all is said and done, this issue is not so much about the
exhibit wall or moat size, as it is about intense emotion in animals,
no different than in the human animal who responds impulsively in the
"heat of passion" to a stimulus that imbues super strength.

An animal, once used to familiar surroundings, feels secure and wants
to stay in them. The lion and tiger grottos at the San Francisco Zoo
are part of the old Works Progress Administration exhibits built for
big cats. In more than half a century of countless inspections - and
nothing terrible like this happening - this catastrophe seems but a
freak accident. One has yet to hear of anything tragic happening
elsewhere, which begs the question: How safe can a zoo build its
barriers without becoming a correctional facility? If someone had
left open a back door and a potentially dangerous animal got out,
that would be another story altogether.

As much as it is an outrage that a member of a critically endangered
species lost her life, it is an equal outrage that not a single word
was said of her or her kind. We humans tend to go into hiding when we
want to talk of the death of a nonhuman animal when the death of a
human animal is associated with it. This is wrong.

Many zoo visitors felt profound sorrow for losing beautiful Tati in
such a violent way. They also felt sorry for her companion, Tony, who
lost his mate. Others spoke of prosecution under the federal
Endangered Species Act, arguably the greatest landmark legislation,
wherein the tiny snail darter, a humble fish with no commercial
value, prevailed over the mighty Tennessee Tellico Dam. For once, we
anthropocentric humans could see beyond the word "resource" and
embrace wildlife within the moral arena for being, as John Muir would
state, merely "good for themselves."

Siberian tigers, being high profile megafauna and the largest living
felid, have not fared better for their appeal. The flourishing,
lucrative Asian medicinal trade as well as intense logging in their
frigid, mountainous, forested Russian and Chinese range have all but
destroyed them. Losing Tatiana was doubly tragic as she would be on
breeding loan to propagate her kind.

Last and certainly not least, we must invoke the language of the
basic anti-cruelty statute: "... every person who overdrives,
overloads, drives when overloaded, overworks, tortures, torments ...
any animal, is, for every such offense, guilty of a crime punishable
as a misdemeanor or as a felony or alternatively punishable as a
misdemeanor or a felony and by a fine of not more than $20,000."

The San Francisco Department of Animal Care and Control is
responsible for enforcing the state humane laws. Now that the
evidence is in, District Attorney Kamala Harris must be persuaded to
act. This case has reached the end of the beginning; now the
beginning of the end must be about justice for Tatiana.

Patricia Briggs is a San Francisco resident and a former zoo docent.


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