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Prologue: A Message From Tatiana
It was on December 26, 2007, when people around the world would first hear about the shocking attack that had occurred at the San Francisco Zoo. One person had been killed and two others critically injured. Blood was splattered everywhere. The police had gunned down the perpetrator. It was, according to all reports, a scene of mass chaos. For not only had a murderous assault taken place on Christmas day, but the killer was not even human.
Tatiana was a four-and-a-half year old Siberian tiger. She had been born in Denver, Colorado, but she was transferred to San Francisco in 2005. She was, at the time, considered to be a sparkling new addition to the zoo’s tiger exhibition. Such embracing attitudes did not last long, especially after Tatiana managed to scale the twelve-foot high wall of her enclosure and escape. There had been these teenagers. They were yelling obscenities, waving their arms, and possibly throwing stuff at her. One visitor described how these young men had been doing the same exact thing with the nearby lions, and that the lions were pissed off. The woman gathered up her family and promptly left the area. Angry lions are scary, even when they are tucked behind bars. Tigers can be even more frightening.
Tatiana went directly after the men who had been taunting her and ripped one of them to pieces. The other two ran. For twenty minutes, Tatiana roamed the zoo grounds. She was presented with many opportunities to attack park employees and emergency responders. She could easily have gone after other visitors. But Tatiana was singular in her purpose. She wanted to find those two remaining teenagers, and she would do just that at the Terrace Cafe. With a dismembering taking place, police encircled the spot and shined their lights onto the tiger. Tatiana turned and approached. They shot her dead.
Zoos and circuses have a standard operating procedure in dealing with the aftermath of such incidences of violence by captive animals. Step One is to claim that escapes and attacks are very rare. They almost never happen. The general public has nothing to worry about. Journalists have nothing to investigate. Yet, we have to ask, is this true? It was one year earlier when Tatiana attacked a trainer. With families watching from about four feet away, the tiger squeezed her paws through the narrow bars of the cage, clawed onto a keeper’s arm, and pulled it in for a bite. “While we were heading out,” a parent lamented, “I could still hear . . . screaming.” San Francisco officials would state that it was “the only injury of its kind that has happened at the zoo.” This was not true. Tinkerbelle the elephant had been involved in a series of dust ups with zoo employees. Then there was Fatima, a female Persian leopard. In 1990, she jumped onto the back of a trainer and bit his neck. “I thought the leopard was going to kill him,” one onlooker noted. “He was screaming, ‘Help me, help me; get him off, get him off.’ I was scared. That was not the kind of thing I expected to see at the zoo.” If only the visitor had known.
In the past two decades, in the United States alone, captive tigers have killed ten people and injured countless more. A partial list would include the 2008 attack on a trainer at the Hawthorn Corporation. Hawthorn is a leasing agency and training facility located outside of Chicago, Illinois. Its fifty tigers are loaned out throughout the year to various circuses and entertainment enterprises. In 2007, it was Berani, a Sumatran tiger, who chomped onto a trainer’s head at the San Antonio Zoo. A year before that it was a tiger named Enshala at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida. Enshala escaped her enclosure and went after a veterinarian. Lowry’s ten-member weapons team, trained by local police, assembled. Many zoos, in fact, have these armed squads whose sole purpose is to respond to escapes and attacks. As for Enshala’s fate, she would die after being hit by four shotgun blasts.
In 2005, it would be back to Hawthorn—where a tiger attacked a touring visitor. In 2004, the Cole Brothers Circus had an escapee run into the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens. His name was Apollo, a white Bengal tiger, and he would startle picnic-goers and cause a five car pile-up on the Jackie Robinson Parkway. In 2003, another white Bengal made the news. It was during a Siegfried and Roy show in Las Vegas, when Montecore clamped down on the neck of Roy Horn and dragged him off stage. Roy barely survived the encounter. That same year a Sumatran tiger named Castro attacked his trainer at the Sacramento Zoo. The man would also survive, but not by much. In 2000, an Amur tiger escaped during a fundraiser at Zoo Boise in Idaho. “Feast for the Beast,” as the party was publicized, was almost just that. The tiger chased down a patron and began chewing on her. Police ended up shooting the woman but missed the cat.
In 1998, it was Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus’s turn for trouble. While stopped in St. Petersburg, Florida in January, several tigers were brought into the center of the ring for a photography session. Trainer Richard Chipperfield was in charge. At some point in the photo session Arnold, a four year-old tiger, decided to grab a hold of Chipperfield’s head with his teeth. Only after being whipped and sprayed with a fire extinguisher did the tiger let go. But the damage had been done. Arnold was returned to his cage, and the trainer’s brother, Graham, executed the tiger with five shots. Graham himself had been attacked several years earlier by a group of performing lions. As for Ringling Brothers, their problems would continue. In November of that same year, another tiger would escape and take a run at a trainer. It also ended violently.
Our list of confrontations could go on. We could add to those incidents that happened outside of the United States. There was, for example, a tiger attack in Moscow in February of 2006. Asked afterwards about whether the Russian circus was going to kill the tiger involved, the trainer responded with honesty. “If we were to shoot every tiger that attacks us, there wouldn’t be any remaining.” Not so lucky was the fugitive tiger from
