Amplify: A tiger that had once been part of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey circus was shot and killed by officers from the Henry County Police Department after it escaped and attacked a dog. Feld officials said they were still trying to figure out how the tiger got out and were unaware that it had been on the loose for several hours. No people were injured by the six-year-old female tiger named Suzy, who had been raised by its trainer since it was a cub.
3 comments:
I really don't understand how a fully grown tiger can just go missing or get loose without someone noticing. If you're traveling with potentially dangerous animals then the first thing you need to do when you stop overnight is make sure that they are safe and secure. Personally I don't understand why the police had to kill the tiger rather than just use some kind of a tranquilizer. I know that it attacked a dog in a backyard, but that probably can mostly be attributed to the fact that it was in an entirely new environment and was scared. Tigers are already an endangered species so the fact that the police made this decision is really disheartening. There aren't a whole lot of details in this article about the police's interaction with the tiger, so I would be interested to learn if she was actually threatening them or not. Perhaps she was being aggressive towards them and they had no choice but to kill her, but either way its very sad that things turned out that way.
The fact that the Tiger wasn't identified as missing until the transport shipment arrived at its destination is absurd. A tiger isn't a suitcase or property that will stay put, but has a will and volition of its own, and the company involved in transport should face consequences for its inability to provide safe transport for a live animal. I can imagine the trainer is very upset, and can understand why the police needed to contain the animal, but agree with Megan that another way to safely capture the tiger without killing it would have been a better choice. That said, I can't imagine Atlanta police have very much experience with capturing a large wild cat, but surely experts could have been called in, or the zoo consulted. The tiger was loose for several hours according to the article, so if proper checks had been in place and the tiger's absence was noticed closer to when it actually happened, the animal perhaps could have been saved.
Not often do you see stories like this, especially with the bigger circuses closing down, but it does raise some concern about the care and attention being given to these shipments and who is running them. Obviously it is terribly sad the tiger was shot and killed by police, but what everyone really needs to remember about these kinds of situations is that the tiger got out in an area that was not the destination or the origin, and therefore proper animal control staffing and resources was probably not available to the local authorities. I’m sure that is this incident occurred anywhere near where the proper resources were available; the tiger would have been able to be incapacitated in an appropriate and safe manner and taken back into custody securely and safely. Sometimes the right resources and funding is not possible and things like this have to happen, but that’s no one’s direct fault.
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