Tigers Had A Good Week..........

8/25/12

BERLIN -- A tiger escaped its enclosure at Cologne Zoo in western Germany on Saturday and killed a female keeper before being shot dead by the zoo's director, police said.
The tiger slipped through a passage between the enclosure and an adjacent storage building, where it fatally attacked the 43-year-old keeper, said police spokesman Stefan Kirchner.
"It appears the gate wasn't properly shut," Kirchner told The Associated Press.
The zoo was evacuated and a SWAT team was called in, police said. But before it arrived the zoo's director managed to kill the tiger by climbing onto the storage building and shooting it through a skylight using a high-caliber rifle.
Kirchner said it was unlikely that members of the public had witnessed the incident.
"This is the darkest day of my life," the zoo's director, Theo Pagel, was quoted as saying by Cologne newspaper Express.
The paper said on its website that the Siberian tiger was a 4-year-old male called Altai that came to Cologne Zoo from an animal park in England. In November it fathered three cubs with a 7-year-old Siberian tiger called Hanya, according to the zoo's website.
Police said the zoo reopened after Saturday's incident, which occurred around noon (1000 GMT; 5 a.m. EDT). However, a planned late-night opening of the zoo has been canceled.
Cologne Zoo is one of the oldest in Germany. It was founded in 1860 and houses some 10,000 animals comprising more than 700 different species.

8/27/12

MONTERREY, Mexico – An escaped pet tiger named Deborah spurred a massive deployment of police, firefighters and other first responders in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, authorities said.

Apolonio Armenta, the Coahuila delegate of Mexico’s environmental protection agency, Profepa, told Efe that alarmed residents began calling police late Wednesday night with reports about a tiger roaming the streets of Saltillo, the state capital.

“It was a tigress between 8 and 12 months old that some thieves allowed to escape when they broke into the office of the pet’s owner, attorney Rodolfo Richards,” Armenta said.

Richards eventually managed to recapture the 50-kilo (110-pound) Bengal tiger.

Deborah was only a month old when the attorney bought her from a pet shop in nearby Monterrey, Armenta said, adding that while Richards has paperwork confirming his ownership of the animal, he failed to register the tiger with Profepa as a pet.  Richards now faces up to 1.2 million pesos ($85,000) in fines if he cannot explain to Profepa’s satisfaction why he didn’t register Deborah.

Mexicans are allowed to keep exotic animals as pets provided the comply with Profepa regulations, which include providing the animal with an appropriate environment and ensuring it does not become a threat to public safety.  Such animals are “relatively quiet, if they live with humans as cubs, you make sure that they don’t suffer from stress or hunger and you give them medical attention to keep them healthy,” Armenta said.

Six months ago, he noted, a mountain lion and a tiger were dumped in front of the Profepa offfice in Coahuila, while army troops later captured an African lion in the town of Nava.

8/26/12

State officials said that Bioparque Estrella had closed Monday when the tiger left its unlocked cage and fatally attacked 26-year-old Herminio Rodriguez Palma. It was unclear why the cage had been left unlocked.

 

The tiger was hunted down and killed

Some 150 police officers and zoo veterinarians began an intense search for the tiger at the 300-hectare (740-acre) wild animal park in the countryside northwest of Mexico City. It was captured and killed before dawn.