The Zong

So imagine that you’re a large, Siberian tiger. Your DNA is coded as such that you have an innate sense of the food chain, and your emotions, while basic, probably function only to assist survival in the wild.

Now imagine that you’ve been put in captivity at one of the worst zoos in America. I mean, any zoo is crappy because you’re a fucking tiger, but this one is especially bad. If you listened in on the general gossip from the staff and could understand it, you’d know that the following happened there recently:

Three of the zoo’s four elephants have died since March 2004 - two at the zoo, a third at a Calaveras County sanctuary where it was sent, broken-down and ailing. The lone survivor still lives there. The fight over the pachyderms’ fate, taken up by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and animal rights activists, enraged the national Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which tabled the zoo’s accreditation for a year.

Puddles, a venerable 44-year-old hippopotamus, died in May, a day after a move that some employees say was bungled and others say should never have been made.

This summer, two giant elands, valued at $30,000 apiece, were killed by their peer soon after all three arrived at the zoo, during a quarantine that sources say was doomed and mishandled. Two black swans, introduced with much fanfare in May 2006, also didn’t last long.

So maybe you’re starting to feel scared and confused by your surroundings, knowing that if they killed anything named Puddles, you’re probably in big fucking trouble.

Fast forward to Christmas, 2007, when the following may or may not have happened:

According to the elder Sousa’s account to police, Dhaliwal told him that he, his brother and the younger Sousa had been “waving their hands and yelling at the tiger” just before the animal bounded up a 12 1/2-foot wall from its dry moat and attacked them.

Well, in all honesty, this probably happens to you a lot, and because you’re fearsome killer, you probably don’t give a shit. Ignoring dipshits is kind of what you do. But let’s imagine that these kids, who were high at the time and possibly drunk, started throwing shit at you.  Like, maybe some washers or rocks.

No police reports have been filed as part of an evolving civil case against the zoo and the city, but affidavits filed with Manoukian in San Jose include statements by a longtime zookeeper and a security guard about events after the Christmas evening mauling.

Any evidence that the youths provoked the tiger’s attack could limit the zoo’s and city’s liability in a civil case.

Anthony Colonnese, noting he had worked at the zoo since 1971 and was very familiar with the tiger exhibit, said he examined the grotto a few days after the attack “looking for things that did not belong in the grotto.”

He said he paid close attention to the part of the grotto “where I knew the two Siberian tigers were in the habit of resting after their mid-afternoon feeding.”

In that area, “I found two stones,” he said. “One stone was made up of a smooth material that was different from any of the rocks or gunite that make up the grotto exhibit.”

Colonnese also said he found a medium-size steel washer in the bottom of the moat. “I am informed that the keeper responsible for the Siberian tiger grotto inspected the grotto the morning of Dec. 25,” he said, suggesting the washer ended up in the moat after.

Admittedly, the evidence looks kinda thin here. Even if the kids were on crack, that doesn’t mean they necessarily threw shit at you. We may never know the real story. But we do know one thing. That you were fucking pissed off:

An autopsy conducted by a zoo veterinarian on the Siberian tiger after police shot it to death showed that the animal had been “very determined to get out,” Matthews said. Its claws were broken and splintered by clambering up the concrete moat wall, Matthews quoted the veterinarian as saying.

“This behavior may be consistent with a tiger that has been agitated and/or taunted,” Matthews said.

So, no matter what the kids did or didn’t do, you wanted to eat them so fucking bad that you basically destroyed your claws climbing up a concrete wall (ouch!) just to get to them.

So yeah, these drunk and high idiots, who drove from San Jose to San Francisco on Christmas morning, maybe didn’t deserve to get eaten, but neither did the tiger deserve to get shot to death. I guess the zoo is still at fault for not making the walls higher, but tiger lovers everywhere are pretty curious for more of this story to come out.

I used to feel kind of bad for the tiger, but after reading how it died, I actually envy the end of its life. Most animals who die in captivity are probably sick, frail, and lonely. Many die peacefully but on a table (as do a lot of humans). Think about how sweet it must have been for that tiger to get free from its confines through sheer will and and despite physical pain, and then snack on its tormentors. Sure, it got shot to death, but I’ll bet any tiger would love to go out like that. The rest of us should be so lucky.

- M.G.