2011 was the last time we commented about the San Francisco Zoo. The post was about the 2007 incident where an escaped tiger mauled a young man to death and injured two of his friends. Police killed the tiger, and the two injured young men received a $900,000 settlement from the Zoo. Although they taunted the animal into an enraged state, they were not held responsible because the Zoo's tiger enclosure wasn't 100% secure.
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| The grizzly was caught on video entering the zookeeper's area |
Recent investigations into the Zoo's policies and procedures have
uncovered incidents that could have resulted in more tragedies but luckily didn't. The most dangerous was one involving a grizzly bear.
One Saturday morning last May, a keeper at the San Francisco Zoo heard footsteps behind him in the grizzly bear grotto. Believing it was a co-worker, he turned, only to see the hulking brown form of Kiona. He thought he’d safely locked her in her den, but the door, which is operated from an adjoining room, had an unusual feature: Its lock could be fastened even without the door being securely closed.
The zookeeper began to run, and with Kiona in pursuit, he circled the grotto, according to people familiar with his account. He then sprinted through the door into the keeper area, according to surveillance video. When Kiona stopped briefly, the keeper escaped through a gate and closed it behind him.
At that point, the almost 500-pound grizzly ambled into the keeper area and was separated from the public by a gate, a regular door and a chain-link barrier, said Travis Shields, then the assistant curator of the zoo’s carnivores department, which includes the bears. Shields was away at the time but was briefed by workers who were involved or listening on the radio.
Zoo employees who came to the keeper’s aid found him in a panic and the grizzly roaming the keeper area, Shields said. The zookeepers managed to coax Kiona into her other outdoor habitat and locked the doors.
It's healthy that the San Francisco Zoo is undergoing an audit. It will need substantial improvements in public safety and animal welfare before the pandas come.
From April of this year:
“San Francisco is absolutely thrilled that we will be welcoming giant pandas to our San Francisco Zoo,” Breed said in a statement Thursday from Beijing, where she signed a memorandum of understanding with Chinese wildlife officials regarding the panda plan.
No timeline was given for the pandas’ arrival. The announcement said it depended on the completion of an enclosure for the animals at the zoo. The number of pandas was also not specified, though pandas often have been sent in pairs...
Owned by the city, the zoo is run by the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society. In addition to the estimated $1 million annual price tag to rent the pandas, it could cost an estimated $25 million to build housing for them at San Francisco Zoo, Peterson told ABC News in February. That would be on top of the cost of maintenance and upgrades needed for the facility’s aging structures, some of which date to the 1930s.
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