ZOO Antwerpen Reindeer Attacks Zoo Keepers Attack Reindeer

I think to be fair the zoo management may not have been entirely to blame in the first instance.
These things can often just happen on the spur of the moment , a normally placid animal can turn in an instant, keepers have to react quickly and may not always get it right , the management may have been totally unaware of the situation anyway. Yes ideally there should have been a written protocol or procedure to follow , health and safety guidelines etc , but again there are no guarentees , things go wrong no matter how well you adhere to rules. At the end of the day , the animal should have been tranquilized as soon as possible , it took FAR too long to get under any kind of control. Once the first mistake had been made the situation just escalated out of control which it should not have. They are lucky that all involved got out of it relatively lightly considering.

 

The male Reindeer shows typical fighting behaviour against its 'rival'(the grappling keepers) by refusing to disengage antlers- which would allow the rival male to give use its own headgear to stab/beat it with.

Hitting it with the shovel only increased the fighting stimulus and made it carry on. Male deer in rut, particularly handreared or otherwise tame ones, are notoriously dangerous at that time- even a smaller species like the Roe can be aggressive (in captivity) to people.

 

Absolutely!

 

Apologies for bumping an old thread, but have only just seen this video via this recent post - Reindeer Trouble at a Zoo
(Wasn't aware of the incident and have never previously been on the Belgian thread, not being familiar with or had the honour of visiting their fine zoos!)

Firstly I agree with the majority of the above comments. While the keeper should not have been in the exhibit by herself with a rutting stag, the lack of assistance in removing an injured staff member from danger and repeatedly hitting the animal over the head with a shovel is beyond words. To then follow it up by removing the stag from on-show by manhandling was ridiculous and dangerous. Appreciate that this incident is now well and truly old news, seven years later.

However the additional point that I wanted to make was that I had been involved in a similar attack from a reindeer stag (many years ago and the zoo shall remain un-named!). Another keeper was tending the large group of reindeer by himself and was attacked by our very large stag (made the Antwerp one look like a pipsqueak). One could only enter the enclosure with the reindeer and up till this point we had never had any issues with the male (in fact previously he had been very handleable). The difference with my experience and the Antwerp video was that other staff ran to the reindeer exhibit when the radio call went through, 4-6 staff (including myself) grabbed hold of the stag by the antlers to rescue the keeper, and then we shoved him back through the gate on to exhibit to get a barrier between us and him. It was a close call and the keeper was lucky; he had puncture wounds near his femoral artery. As a follow up the zoo quickly built keeper races into the off-show design that meant we could lock away the stag from us. No shovels around the head were required...

 

I have also been involved with two similar incidents, one with two male reindeer, which were keen to fight with one another and whoever got in their way, and also with a hand-reared male red deer who was determined to kill me or anyone else that came too near!

 

I think your point about hand-reared stags is very telling. Any hand-raised or tolerant male hoofstock change behaviour dramatically with maturity/females in proximity. Unfortunately humans often don't pick up on the cues.
I've also worked with muntjac, chinese water, roe, hog and red deer stags which were not hand-tame, and consequently always kept their distance when keepers entered the exhibit, even when they were in rut.

 

I haven't viewed the footage and have also come to this thread late, but I wonder if, in such an adrenalin fuelled state a tranqualiser would have worked?I remember feeding free ranging deer at Lowther wildlife park in Cumberland in the early 1970's, though still in velvet the antlers of even the fallow deer were rather threatening when they demanded food and pushed you up against the car.