Sunday, February 25, 2007
Face Off in the Circle
A real tragedy hit the Denver Zoo yesterday as a 6 year old (middle aged?) Jaguar mauled to death an unknown zookeeper and was shot to death as it approached rescue workers.
The Jaguar is the third largest big cat behind the really huge Siberian Tiger (800 pounds) and the African Lion (400 pounds) and they are not very big (the Denver mauler was only 140 pounds) but they have a different way of killing prey which makes them really dangerous. We used to think that the other big cats often bit into the throat of large prey and closed the windpipe and suffocated the prey. The guys who are out in the wild watching and filming the big cats began to wonder because they didn't always see a real clamping down but more often there was a 'soft' bite on the throat and within just a few seconds an immobile prey and within a few minutes a dead animal (that's a little quick for a death by suffocation--as mass murderer Richard Speck infamously told us on video--when strangling someone, you've got to really get on it for about four minutes). It turns out the soft bite closed down the arteries to the brain and rendered unconscious and then killed the animal quickly.
Jaguars don't usually mess around with the throat, they bite you right in the head, generally from the back, and put four big canines through your skull right into your brain, which trauma and bleeding kills you just as effectively as the throat (or carotid) clamp.
We still don't know how the zoo worker got into the space containing the Jaguar and whether such space sharing is a routine practice. I'm sure most of the time, if it is routine to go into the cage, nothing happens, but you wonder why there's any need for that.
As I say, a real tragedy.
The Jaguar is the third largest big cat behind the really huge Siberian Tiger (800 pounds) and the African Lion (400 pounds) and they are not very big (the Denver mauler was only 140 pounds) but they have a different way of killing prey which makes them really dangerous. We used to think that the other big cats often bit into the throat of large prey and closed the windpipe and suffocated the prey. The guys who are out in the wild watching and filming the big cats began to wonder because they didn't always see a real clamping down but more often there was a 'soft' bite on the throat and within just a few seconds an immobile prey and within a few minutes a dead animal (that's a little quick for a death by suffocation--as mass murderer Richard Speck infamously told us on video--when strangling someone, you've got to really get on it for about four minutes). It turns out the soft bite closed down the arteries to the brain and rendered unconscious and then killed the animal quickly.
Jaguars don't usually mess around with the throat, they bite you right in the head, generally from the back, and put four big canines through your skull right into your brain, which trauma and bleeding kills you just as effectively as the throat (or carotid) clamp.
We still don't know how the zoo worker got into the space containing the Jaguar and whether such space sharing is a routine practice. I'm sure most of the time, if it is routine to go into the cage, nothing happens, but you wonder why there's any need for that.
As I say, a real tragedy.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 11:08 AM 
