Zoo wall lower than recommended

An official said it’s
becoming clear the tiger jumped or climbed out before attacking.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The director of the zoo where a teenager was killed by an escaped tiger acknowledged Thursday that the wall around the animal’s pen was just 12 1/2 feet high — well below the height recommended by the accrediting agency for the nation’s zoos.

San Francisco Zoo Director Manuel A. Mollinedo also admitted that it is becoming increasingly clear the 350-pound Siberian tiger leaped or climbed out of its open-air enclosure, perhaps by grabbing onto a ledge.

“She had to have jumped,” he said. “How she was able to jump that high is amazing to me.” Mollinedo said investigators have ruled out the theory the tiger escaped through a door behind the exhibit.

According to the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, the walls around a tiger exhibit should be at least 16.4 feet high. But Mollinedo said the nearly 70-year-old wall was 12 feet 5 inches, with what he described as a “moat” 33 feet across.

He said safety inspectors had examined the 1940 wall and never raised any red flags about its size.

“When the AZA came out and inspected our zoo three years ago, they never noted that as a deficiency,” he said. “Obviously now that something’s happened, we’re going to be revisiting the actual height.”

Mollinedo said the “moat” contained no water and has never had any. He did not address whether that affected the tiger’s ability to get out.

Even with the wall’s lowered height, the tiger still wouldn’t likely have been able to spring up, grasp the top of the wall and hoist itself out of the enclosure, John Seidensticker, head of the Conservation Ecology Center at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, said late Thursday.

“It all depends on the surface and whether they could climb up it,” he said. “I really don’t think a tiger could spring that high. A leopard could. A leopard could in a minute.”

Seidensticker emphasized that he has not seen the San Francisco Zoo’s tiger enclosure.

On Wednesday, the zoo director said that the wall was 18 feet high and the moat 20 feet wide. Based on those earlier, incorrect estimates, animal experts expressed disbelief that a tiger in captivity could have made such a spectacular leap.

AZA spokesman Steven Feldman said that the minimum height is just a guideline and that a zoo could still be deemed safe even if its wall were lower.

Accreditation standards require “that the barriers be adequate to keep the animals and people apart from each other,” Feldman said. “Obviously something happened to cause that not to be the case in this incident.”

Feldman would not comment on how difficult it would be for a tiger to scale a 12 1/2-wall. But Siberian tigers are known to have phenomenal strength, at least in the wild.

“There are rare glimpses of this in the real world that suggest, when taunted, tigers can be fairly extraordinary in their physical feats,” said Ronald Tilson, who is director of conservation at the Minnesota Zoo and the big-cat expert who sets safety standards for tiger exhibits at North American zoos.

Many other U.S. zoos have significantly higher walls around their tigers.

The animal, a female named Tatiana, went on a rampage near closing time on Christmas Day, mauling three visitors before it was shot to death by police.

Carlos Sousa Jr., 17, died. Brothers Paul Dhaliwal, 19, and Kulbir Dhaliwal, 23, were at San Francisco General Hospital with severe bite and claw wounds. Their names were provided by hospital and law enforcement sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the family had not yet given permission to release their names.

An attempt to reach Paul Dhaliwal on his cell phone Thursday was unsuccessful because his voice mail was full and wouldn’t accept messages.

Police are still investigating and have declared the big-cat exhibit a crime scene.