This is what happens when people have inappropriate conceptions about animal behavior
Note: I originally wrote this article almost a month ago, before the incident involving the teenagers and the tiger at the San Francisco Zoo. After that incident, I decided to hold off posting this until the matter calmed down a bit. Now that reddit isn’t being spammed with constant updates on the incident, I feel its safe to throw my two cents into the conversation, though I will not address this particular incidentspecifically.
As explained in this article (Warning: graphic picture), a man was mauled to death by two tigers when he climbed over a protective barrier, and stuck his arm through the bars of the cage to take a close up picture with his cell phone. To paraphrase a comment from bash.org, they should put something in the cage to deter people from getting near it. Perhaps a fierce animal that would attack anyone that got too close?
A sad point to this story is that his wife and kid saw the whole thing. But one just had to wonder… What the hell did he think was going to happen?!? Did he expect to just snap a few pictures while the tigers sat there? Maybe that they would do a little dance for him? I wish this were an isolated incident, but it is not.
Binky the polar bear was kept at the Anchorage zoo in Alaska, and become famous for mauling tourists. One incident involved an Australian women climbing over two fences in order to get to the bars of the cage to take a close up shot. Binky stuck his head through the bars of the cage and grabbed her leg. More recently, different woman, different zoo, different polar bear, same result. I am unable to find a more detailed version of the news story at the moment, but if i recall correctly the women made statements like “I didn’t think it would move so fast,” and “I didn’t think they would keep a dangerous animal in a zoo.”
Its that last statement in particular that leaves me scratching my head.
Have you ever walked down the street and encountered someone with a dog who assures you that “Snugly poo doesn’t bite!”? This is a dangerous attitude for an animal owner to have. What it seems to boil down to is that a lot of people think that there are two types of dogs: dogs that bite, and dogs that don’t. You just gotta make sure that you got the non-biting kind, and everything will be good. But if he EVER bites, dump his ass as quick as you can, cause he is crazy and vicious and unpredictable.
The simple fact of the matter is that EVERY dog is capable of biting, and in fact WILL bite, given the proper circumstances. Deluding yourself into thinking that your dog wouldn’t bite you, no matter what you do to it, is lulling yourself into a false and dangerous sense of security.
Viki Hearne, in one of her numerous books, offers the interesting anecdote that the number of accidents involving animals (domestic and other wise) went up immediately after the rise of the automobile. She speculates that, pre-automobile, horses where the primary mode of transportation, and hence were everywhere. You couldn’t help but get to know how to behave around a horse, and to know that even the most mild horse will bite and kick if provoked. These days, it is entirely possible to go through life with essentially no interaction with an animal. This has left us in a position where most people in the urban areas of the west simply do not know how act around animals. For example, they do stupid things like stick there arms into animal enclosures at the zoo.
But it has implications for the animals as well. A lot of people honestly seem to believe that any dog that bites must be killed, regardless of circumstances. A few years ago, I saw a news article about several teenage boys who were attacked by a dog. The full story is that the dog was in a fenced in yard. The kids started throwing rocks at it, and hit it several times. It jumped the fence and bit several of them. The dog was put down as being dangerous and vicious.
I cannot conceive of what kind of twisted logic leads you to the conclusion that a dog that was provoked into attacking in self defense is vicious or dangerous. Doesn’t it defeat the point of having a guard dog, if the dog is too chicken shit to defend itself? Doesn’t it also defeat the point of having a guard dog if the dog isn’t allowed to, you know… guard?
An even more bizarre example of animal ignorance occurred a little over a year ago. I cannot find a link to the article, but what happened is that a park ranger had to stop a women who was posing her 4 year old son in front of a wild grizzly bear so she could take a cute picture. The whole idea of it just leaves me speechless, so I don’t even know what to say about it.
Unfortunately, the victims of peoples animal ignorance aren’t always themselves. This article, for example, is about a 4 year old boy who was killed by several rottweilers. The father of the boy left him alone while he and several friends went into the basement to do electrical work. There was one dog in the house with the boy, and 2 more outside. The dogs belonged to a friend staying with them. It seems the toddler went out side looking for his farther, and ended up being killed by the dogs.
Several things immediately spring to mind here. First of all, who the hell leaves a 4 year old kid alone with one big dog, let alone three? For that matter, who leaves a 4 year old kid alone at all? Why were the dogs loose and unsupervised when a kid was around? The inquest the article mentions is going to “make recommendations about how to prevent a similar tragedy.” Here’s one: realize that dogs of any size and breed are inherently dangerous animals. Don’t leave them loose and unsupervised.
Needless to say, the dogs were destroyed. But why? Essentially, for being dogs. Untrained, unsupervised, poorly owned dogs with bad owners, but essentially just being dogs.
The bottom line to this that animals are dangerous for a very simple reason: they have brains. They can decide to do something. They can offer novel behavior in response to stimulus. The dog that you’ve smacked every day for years can decide he is sick of it, and fight back.
Guns are dangerous too, but in a very different way. To quote Portal, the Weighted Companion Cube will never try to harm you. Neither will your gun. But the only reason we can make these claims is because the damn things are inanimate, and hence cannot “try” to do anything. If you want something soft and cuddly and totally safe, get a stuffed animal and leave the real ones alone. But if you get a real animal, remember: it has teeth, claws, and a brain. If it decides it wants to hurt you, it can and will, and anyone who tells you that it would never do such a thing is either lying or profoundly ignorant.
You hear about mauling in regards to dogs more often than any other animal, but that just a result of the fact that most of us have a much, much higher chance of interacting with dogs than any other animal. The maulings at the zoo show that this isn’t a problem with a particular animal, or a particular species. Its a conceptual problem people have in regard to animals in general.
Unfortunetly, the conceptual problems aren’t limited only to underestimating the safety of some animals. Certain breeds of dogs are portrayed as extremly dangerous. But when you sit down and crunch the numbers, you find out that dogs bite, but balloons and slippers are more dangerous.
UPDATE
Since I originally wrote this article, I saw a documentary on the Discovery Channel about Timothy Treadwell called “Grizzly Man.” The shear stupidity of this man astounds me, and I feel that basically anything and everything I want to convey in this article can be gleaned from watching this documentary.
Timothy spent 13 seasons living among the bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska (USA). At the end of his last season, he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a bear. Watching the documentary, which is made up of footage he shot himself interspersed with interviews with friends and family, you see him repeatably getting dangerously close to wild bears. In addition to the close proximity, he clearly has a dangerously anthropomorphic conception of the animals behaviors.
Listing here all the dangerously stupid things he did would drastically increase the size of this post, so I will leave it to interested parties to watch it. Suffice it to say that in Timothy Treadwell, we have a micosom of the fundamental misconceptions many people in our society have in regard to animals.