After two tragic incidents in months does safety at English zoos need a rethink?
On a busy Saturday afternoon at a zoo in Yorkshire, visitors looked on in horror as a man climbed into a tiger habitat, minutes after posing for a photograph beside it. Eyewitnesses said he scaled a metre-high viewing barrier, before dropping into the enclosure below, overpowering a woman who tried to pull him back. The resident 30-stone Siberian tiger, named Altai, was seen pawing at the man, who was dragged away, and later declared dead at the scene. Yorkshire Wildlife Park remained closed on Monday, while a City of Doncaster council spokesperson said the local authority had launched a health and safety investigation into the matter. It marked the second serious incident at a UK zoo in just a few months. In June, a three-year-old boy was seriously injured after being attacked by one or more crocodiles when he ended up in the enclosure at Johnsons of Old Hurst, near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. But experts have said that recent events do not reflect on zoo practices, and may instead point to issues with human behaviour, or mental health or support services. “These were two really terrible events, but rather than being about zoos themselves, I wonder whether they could reflect wider issues in society,” said Amy Dickman, professor of wildlife conservation and the director of WildCRU at the University of Oxford. “Given how many millions of zoo visits there are in a year, these are vanishingly rare instances, although of course that doesn’t negate how deeply tragic they are when they occur,” Dickman, an expert in big cat conservation, added. “I would not conclude that there was a major issue with zoo safety – the harsh reality is that it is virtually impossible for zoos to stop people who are very determined to breach safety measures.” In the Cambridgeshire incident, the boy was allegedly thrown into the crocodile enclosure. Police arrested a 30-year-old man from Norfolk on suspicion of attempted murder at the time of the incident, and police said he was “assessed as not being fit for interview”. This week, a spokesperson for Cambridgeshire police said the investigation was still under way and the suspect had been bailed until 17 December. “Two incidents have happened in the last few months, which is obviously really upsetting and distressing for the sector, but they are actually very, very rare,” Jo Judge, the chief executive at British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA), said. There are hundreds of zoos, aquariums and animal attractions in the UK, and about 32 million people visit BIAZA member zoos and aquariums across Britain and Ireland every year. “The industry has already put in place so many safety measures that it is not being seen as a rising problem or something that we’re not doing enough about. These are just very unusual and very rare incidences,” she added. “It is unbelievable that these two incidents have happened so closely together.” Dickman said that because animals kept in enclosures do not come into contact with humans as those in the wild may do, “for someone to walk into that environment is probably far more dangerous, ironically, than if you were out in the wild with animals that were used to navigating those spaces alongside people.” She said she had “never visited a zoo in the UK and thought ‘this is dangerous’,” adding there was “layer upon layer of protection against people interacting with dangerous animals” and that “you do have to do it very intentionally”. All zoos in the UK must be licensed and follow strict safety procedures to protect their animals and human staff and visitors, with guidelines in place for zoo enclosures, including for sizing and perimeter fences. “There is no accidental falling into a category 1A dangerous animal enclosure, it just doesn’t happen – it’s not designed that way,” said Campbell Murn, a lecturer in conservation science at University of Reading, who until recently sat on Defra’s Zoos expert committee. Category 1A refers to a high-risk species kept in zoos that is capable of causing a human fatality, and includes rhinos, elephants, great apes and big cats. “In terms of preventing intentional entry to enclosures, there’s locks, there’s barriers,” he added. “But short of putting an electric fence [up], which of course has its own health and safety considerations, the protocol remains patrolling staff keeping an eye out for unusual behaviour. “It’s simply not possible though, at an attraction like Yorkshire Wildlife Park that gets hundreds of thousands – if not over a million – visitors a year to keep an eye on everybody all the time.” He said safety had to be balanced against visitor experience, so zoo-goers don’t get “a sense of walking into an electrified fence fortress where they can’t do anything other than look through heavy steel bars”, and used the analogy of “a determined thief”. “If a determined thief wants to get in your house, they’re going to get in your house,” he said. “You can mitigate risk to a certain point but there’s sometimes no stopping events from happening, unfortunately.” Paul Rose, a senior lecturer in psychology (animal behaviour) at the University of Exeter, also said that “public behaviour can be unpredictable, as we all know”. “There will be mitigation in place, such as high fencing, standoff barriers, signage and explanation and a code of conduct for how to behave at the zoo (and for visitors to take responsibility for their actions),” he said. “Risk assessments will also be undertaken regularly.” Following Saturday’s incident, he said he imagined that “lessons will be learned regarding how zoos try to manage the behaviour of the public and how they instruct visitors to conduct themselves in and around enclosures”. “The majority of visitors behave in a way respectful of the animal and environment at the zoo, but there is always a risk of rogue or unusual behaviour, and this will continue to be risk assessed and part of zoo personnel training,” he added. Experts did say they had some concerns about the role the internet and social media may play in encouraging people to interact with wild animals. Judge said: “We do unfortunately see on social media quite often videos of people, mostly in other countries, entering the enclosures with some of these animals, and that is something that we do not support at all.” “They are dangerous wild animals and they should be respected as such,” she added, but said it wasn’t something UK zoos are “hugely concerned about” as they “will make it very, very clear that these are dangerous animals”. But Dickman said that online content was definitely of concern. “Though it may not have been a factor here, it is worrying how many videos exist online of people playing around with tigers and lions,” she added. “AI has made that even worse, and the illusion that people should have those interactions with wild, dangerous animals can be really damaging.”
