When animals attack
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Sometimes it seems animals attack for no reason. Or at least the provocation isn’t apparent to the human victims. In December 2006, a tiger mauled a zoo keeper in San Francisco. Last year, a tiger at Tippi Hedren’s wildlife sanctuary in Acton attacked a caretaker. The articles appear below.
Alexander, left, a 450-pound Bengal tiger, attacked the caretaker at Hedren’s Shambala Preserve.
Dec. 4, 2007
By Richard Winton, Times Staff Writer
A tiger living at actress Tippi Hedren’s wildlife sanctuary mauled a caretaker Monday afternoon, leaving the man in critical condition with multiple bites, a Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman said.
The incident occurred about 3 p.m. at Hedren’s Shambala Preserve in Acton, which houses about 70 African lions, Siberian and Bengal tigers, leopards, servals, mountain lions and bobcats. In an interview, Hedren said the 40-year-old caretaker was jumped by a tiger as the man was cleaning the animal’s enclosure.
Fire officials airlifted the man, identified as Chris Orr, to a hospital. He was listed in critical but stable condition, said county Fire Department spokesman Brendon Peart. ‘It’s a terrible, terrible thing that has happened,’ Hedren said, adding that many of the tigers in her sanctuary come from abused backgrounds. ‘Who knows what happened to this tiger? People have kept them in closets, basements. Two of them were kept in air-conditioning systems.’
The tiger in Monday’s incident is a 4-year-old male.
Hedren said state Fish and Game officers visited the sanctuary to investigate the attack. ‘It came walking over to them,’ she said of the tiger. ‘What makes these animals so dangerous is for no reason at all this kind of accident can happen. It isn’t the tiger’s fault. It is the fault of the people breeding these animals in the first place that leads them to be here.’
She described the tiger in Monday’s incident as a ‘mutt’ that was probably bred in the United States as an exotic pet. The tiger is one of the youngest at the shelter and doesn’t have a history of violence, she said.
Hedren said the preserve’s cats live out their lives in enclosures and are not trained. Hedren, best known for her starring role in the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘The Birds,’ has been pushing legislation for years that would crack down on people who keep tigers as pets and that would also prohibit commercial breeding of the animals.
At a congressional hearing in 2000, Hedren; her daughter, actress Melanie Griffith; and actress Bo Derek spoke out on the issue. All three have been attacked by big cats. At age 19, Griffith required 50 stitches in her face when a lion jumped her. And Derek was bitten on the shoulder in 1981 during the filming of ‘Tarzan, the Ape Man.’
Monday’s mauling marks the latest of several incidents in recent years involving local animal sanctuaries. In 2005, the owners of a Moorpark animal sanctuary were arrested for allegedly allowing a 52-pound Siberian tiger to escape and prowl suburban neighborhoods for four weeks while denying that the cat was theirs. They pleaded guilty earlier this year.
Dec. 23, 2006
By Carla Hall, Times Staff Writer
A San Francisco Zoo keeper was severely injured by a Siberian tiger during a public feeding Friday, authorities said.
The keeper was in surgery late in the afternoon, according to the zoo’s director of animal care, Bob Jenkins, who described her as ‘conscious and coherent’ when she was taken to a hospital. Zoo officials declined to name the woman, a keeper for 10 years.
For the feeding, the zoo’s three tigers and four lions are led into individual pens in the indoor lion house. Steel bars cordon off the animal area. Between the fenced-off animals and a railing that marks the visitors’ area is an alleyway. Two keepers walk the alleyway, flinging sausage-like chunks of a meaty diet made specially for big cats into the pens.
‘Basically they had completed the feeds and were walking around answering questions from the public when this occurred,’ Jenkins said.
Visitors told zoo officials that a 3-year-old female Siberian tiger named Tatiana grabbed ‘the keeper’s hands in her claws and was pulling her,’ said Lora LaMarca, the director of marketing and public relations for the zoo.
A second keeper freed the staffer from the tiger’s grip.
The almost-daily public feedings have been suspended, but the cats will continue to be on display in their outdoor exhibits. The public feedings are ‘a long-standing tradition,’ LaMarca said. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened before.’