Tiger Kills Man in Zoo

There is very sad news (news reference) where a tiger has killed a man who felled into its enclosure most probably by accident. Though some news sources are telling that the man was mentally unstable, at the same time they we are being told that he used to work hard as daily wage earner which tells that he was not that mentally unstable. I guess he must have scaled up the wall in order to have a better look at the tiger; white tiger to be precise, because as the pictures indicate, people were being allowed to see the unique white tiger in its enclosure from quite some distance.

Though this is very sad news and we naturally offer condolences, at the same time we can’t be without giving it a thought why it happened the way it happened.

I think that this is not a case of one man’s tragedy – it is a case of system failure. I read that the fence around tiger’s enclosure was only 3 feet high. There was a deep (15’) moat inside the enclosure and after the fence. The designers of the zoo would have thought only about how to prevent tigers from coming out of the enclosure – but they did not think about how to prevent people from coming inside it! They could prevent tiger from reaching the man but failed to prevent the man reaching the tiger! This is same case where we design even software systems – if we limit imagination to what could happen logically, there would be a time where illogical things would breach the system in a moment…

At the same time it is also interesting to know that when the man felled into the enclosure, the tiger did not instantly attack him. The tiger waited for 10 minutes and then attacked the man. The tiger was born and brought up in the zoo – so we can assume that it had not yet killed any living animal. Since it was born to a tigress inside the zoo, it must never have seen its mother hunt too! Then from where did it get the instinct to kill! Though its background explains why it took long time to attack, we can notice that sooner or later its natural instinct to attack and kill anyone threatening it (encroaching its enclosure meant the tiger felt threatened) came out!