I covered this story yesterday. It seemed a straightforward accident and similar to others which I recall with some sadness. I only chose one link to post but afterwards did some investigation on what other papers were saying. Too many contradictions for my liking. Contradictions stink...especially when someone has died and another is in hospital with serious injuries. Check out: Keeper Killed - Investigation Essential I visited Dai Nam a couple of years ago with the specific purpose of visiting the zoo. The animals were there but the place was not yet open. I made a couple of failed attempts to sneak in but failed. The resort itself is absolutely mind blowing. It must have cost billions of dollars to build. A fantastic 'must see' place if you ever get to Ho Chi Minh City.
There sure are a lot of contradictions with this. One of the angles which keeps coming up is that the fence was electrified. It seems to me that too much faith is placed in electric fences. While under ordinary circumstances they may be effective, electrification of an inadequate fence is not going to stop an animal which is stressed or angry.
Wwithout making any judgement on the Dai Nam tragedy I would agree with Ara's general assessment of electric fences. They are a good back up for a real fence, but that's all. Farmers will tell you of feral pigs squealing in anticipation of the shock that they know that they are going to get - but charging through the fence anyway to get to the goodies on the other side. Circus folk will tell you of elephants quickly learning to short circuit their electric fence to get out for a stroll. Older Whipsnade keepers will tell you about the chimps learning to leap frog and cartwheel out of the electrified area of their confinement. At a zoo here in Australia where electric fences are used extensively, primates soon learned to hop up the insulators to escape.
oh dear... is it just me, or am I noticing that in big cat attacks in zoos tigers are the ones to usually, there have only been a few cases that I know that involve lions.
Just a thought but could the contradictions be also down to poor journalism rather than a cover up. If the zoo didnt give an official statement, then staff from groundsman to cashier could have been asked for comment and all might have heard a different story that they passed on. In an emergency situation chaos ensures and it often takes awhile for the truth to come out.
