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Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Deja Vu, All Over Again


How much is your life worth?  More or less than the cost of an entry ticket to a zoo?

Well, we almost made it through the first month of 2017 without someone jumping or falling into a zoo exhibit with lethal results.  In this case, there were two fatalities - the human, a man known only as Zhang, and a tiger, which was shot in a failed attempt to save Zhang's life.  According to officials, Zhang had not purchased a ticket, and was killed after scaling a wall.

I swear, if I ever get a load of money and am allowed to build a brand new zoo, all of the visitor paths are going to go through acrylic tunnels.  At no point will visitors have unobstructed access to any animal.  Obviously, our species has devolved over the past century or so, and we can, as a whole, no longer be trusted around moated zoo enclosures.

Reading the last paragraph, I feel slightly bad... but maybe I'm just having fatigue from seeing this totally-preventable occurrence happen over and over again.  This wasn't a child who was too young to know better, as in the Harambe incident in Cincinnati, or was accidentally dropped by a family member, as happened in Pittsburgh.  This person doesn't appear to have been mentally ill, like man in Chile, or a deliberate suicide, as was the case in Pakistan.  This is just a guy who climbed a fence... and paid a terrible cost. 

The thing is, though, he's not the only one who had to pay it.

Image result for tiger zoo china

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