Thursday 28 July 2016

Zoo animals: fighting back

From Cincinnati.com, last month:

A holiday weekend outing at Cincinnati's zoo turned doubly tragic Saturday when a 3-year-old boy was hospitalized after falling into a gorilla enclosure - and zoo workers had to kill the rare gorilla to protect the boy.

This month:

From NY Times:

A woman was killed by a tiger over the weekend after jumping out of a car in a Beijing animal park to try to save her daughter [who had foolishly got out of the car] from a tiger attack, local government officials said.

From The Evening Standard:

A seven-year-old girl has tragically died after she was struck by rock which was hurled by an elephant at a zoo in Morocco. The youngster was posing for a picture outside the animal’s enclosure when she was hit by the large rock in Rabat.

Not strictly speaking zoo animals but included for completeness:

From The Daily Mail:

A man from Valencia has died after being gored by a heifer in a bull-run near the southern Spanish town of Alicante.

The deadly incident occurred about 1 a.m. Saturday during late-night festivities in the small village of Pedreguera. The Red Cross says the heifer gored the 29-year-old man through the chest and stomach.


(What a heifer was doing at a bull run is not explained).

Also from The Daily Mail:

The wife of a top bullfighter looked on in horror as her husband was gored to death during a festival in eastern Spain. Victor Barrio, 29, from Segovia was fighting in Teruel, Aragon in eastern Spain when the bull speared him through the chest.

And a happy ending help calm our jangling nerves:

From The Daily Mail:

Clearly this tiny baby was just the snack this hungry polar bear was after. In an amazing video a bear can be seen instinctively attacking a baby in a Missouri zoo - but mercifully the tot is on the other side of the glass.

This is all getting a bit out of hand, I preferred the good old days when we just had cow attacks, that's a fair fight at least.

2 comments:

James Higham said...

Fair's fair though - there was a goring by a heifer.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, for sure, heifers have the same right to self defence as bulls, but they are in breach of the Trade Misdescriptions Act (or its Spanish equivalent):

"Hey! I came here to be trampled by a bull, not by a heifer! I want my money back!"