Physicist Calculates Trajectory of Tiger At SF Zoo 713
KentuckyFC writes "Is it really possible for a 350-pound tiger to leap a 12.5-foot barrier from 33 feet away? (Said another way: a 159-kg tiger, a 3.8 m barrier, and 10 m away.) A physicist at Northeastern University has done the math, a straightforward problem in ballistics, and the answer turns out to be yes (abstract on the physics arXiv). But I guess we already knew that following the death of Carlos Souza at the paws of Tatiana, a Siberian Tiger he had allegedly been taunting at San Francisco zoo at the end of last year."
Hmm (Score:2)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
=Smidge=
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Tigers acting like tigers (Score:4, Funny)
Or as a friend of mine commented, "If they were six-foot cuddly bunny-rabbits, we'd have called them bunny-rabbits, not tigers!"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because in the case of tigers, it is a very real danger? At least, a tiger who eats a human (whether the tiger killed the human or simply ran across a body) is liable to start to see humans as food, and a tiger will hunt and kill anything it sees as food.
This tiger didn't actually eat anyone... but it wasn't killed due to the fear of it being a future man
Very Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Who says animals are stupid?
Re:Very Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, I find that very interesting too. It pretty much proves to me that this was their own stupid fault. This was not some random man-killing tiger who escaped on a whim and hunted a human. This thing was pissed, it was out for revenge, and there's no way it was going to those lengths just because it was mildly annoyed. Out of all the visitors to ever walk past the cage, these were the only ones to taunt it in any way? Not bloody likely. They must have gone above and beyond the call of stupid duty to provoke this attack.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the guy 400 yards away with the high-powered rifle has the advantage. As was verified in this case.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
"What's in that case sir?"
"Oh it's just my photography equipment. I have a very high long zoom lens for, uh
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, most folks believe that human life is more important than animal life, so when a police officer arrives to find a "rare" tiger mauling a "common" human, you can't be surprised when he opts to kill kill the freaking cat. The suggestion that the lives of a few humans should be willfully sacrificed to preserve the life of an animal flies against our built-in desire to preserve our race, so don't expect to be popular when you make it.
How many tigers in the world (Score:5, Interesting)
The number of tigers in zoos is about 4000.
As many as 3000 tigers may be in farms in China, being raised to sell as traditional medicine for people whose penises aren't big enough or who think their bones will make them stronger.
The number of tigers that are kept as pets by Americans is about 6000. There are animal activists like Tippi Hedren trying to make laws against keeping tigers as pets, because almost nobody who has pet tigers has enough space and resources to let them live like tigers need to, especially the occasional drug dealer in some apartment building in New York who wanted to out-macho his competitors' pit bulls. She's well-intentioned, but the species needs all the genetic diversity it can get, even though tigers aren't meant to live like house-cats.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dont be an idiot (Score:3, Interesting)
Fair enough. I'm with you so far...
Sorry, now you lost me. I think you'll likely disagree if one of those "few" is either yourself or someone you love. It sickens me to think that your regard for human life is a function ofho
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who "designed the enclosure"? It was (IIRC) a WPA project from the 1930's. It wasn't designed, it was built.
The crazy part was that the people who ran the zoo had no idea of its height, or lack thereof. And when inspectors came through the zoo a couple of years ago, nobody mentioned to the zoo that the height was below standard. In other words, it's not a design problem (the height was fine when it was built, back when nobody was stupid enough to taunt tigers like that), it's a maintenance problem, as in keeping up to standards, or even knowing that you aren't.
Distance (Score:4, Interesting)
One night I was watching some European wolves pace around there cage, when one caught my eye. Eye contact bad! It walked slowly down the exhibit and launched at the wall hitting the top. I left quickly... The Mexican wolves were rumored to escape often.
People want to see the animals, and like everything else in this world it is a balance of risks. It's bad enough that the animals appear so sedate, but compound that with a realistic safe distance, and it would be a recipe for disaster. There was a reason they used bars back in the day.
Design Problem was known for 40 years (Score:3, Informative)
The real reason the wall worked that long is that none of the tigers had previousl
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Until someone sets up a camera.
And then some thin mesh wire.
Don't assume that animals are dumb because they live in water
Wow, talk about an unsafe zoo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow, talk about an unsafe zoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Staying on that theme... (Score:5, Funny)
Now jump that fence or I shall taunt you a second time.
First order approximation... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow, talk about an unsafe zoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The SF Zoo? Hah! (Score:5, Insightful)
How so? The fence is the same height today it was when it was a public zoo. The zoo was public when the fence was built. Seems a better case can be made that public zoos don't know how to design safe tiger enclosures.
Not a valid public/private test case (Score:3, Insightful)
However the current management of the zoo has everything to do with the height of the wall, even though the wall was built before the management took charge, because the wall was built before safety standards were established.
If the safety standards were established after the current management took charge, the older management was to blame; if it t
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously the tiger evolved, and the zoo budget didn't include studies of the tiger's new superpowers. Same thing happened with the flying squirrel and the electric eel, but in those cases nobody died.
Oh noes! My Ideology is being challenged! (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when the zoo was built, no one knew the
What a load of crap. (Score:4, Informative)
There does appear to be problems with the way the SF zoo is being operated now, but this particular case is a long standing condition that neither the public caretakers, private owners, nor the AZA made any effort to fix.
Never mind the physics (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Never mind the physics (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I believe they DID kill it with a shotgun - just not loaded with birdshot. Slugs. You don't use a high powered rifle in a setting like that, or bet your life on a handgun. A 12-gauge with slugs will definitely kill something that sized, no problem.
Re:Never mind the physics (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Never mind the physics (Score:5, Funny)
Lesson in international relationships... (Score:2)
35mph sure - but not uphill! (Score:2, Informative)
Prior Research (Score:5, Funny)
All prior researchers have not returned from the jungle. Information is incomplete.
Call in the lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the zoo was negligent. It should have known the safe parameters for a tiger enclosure.
However, in the law, there's a doctrine called comparative (or contributory negligence). This means that where two people are negligent and one gets hurt, his or her recovery is reduced by his or her own proportion of the fault.
F'rex: A jury looks at this situation and says "Boy, the zoo sure was negligent, they should have built a higher wall. But boy, did this guy act stupidly, entering the enclos
Not exactly... (Score:3, Informative)
Still, it's a damned shame. For the tiger, that is. Not for the drunken nimrod who was teasing her, going so far as to pass the barriers erected to keep the public back from the animals, according to the evidence found at
Which begs the question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Another interesting calculation... (Score:5, Funny)
An object of 750kg can accelerate to 60km/h in 5 impulses (rapid pushes).
How far will an object of 75kg travel when one such impulse is applied at angle of 45 degrees upward?
The 750kg object is a horse. About 5 pushes of hind hooves are enough to reach the full speed.
The 75kg object is a human kicked by the horse (remaining motionless with a counter-push of front hooves).
The result was something like 30 meters. The damage was equivalent to fall from 6th floor.
And they tell us horses can't say "no" when they don't want sex.
Possibilities vs explanations (Score:5, Insightful)
If we already know the answer, then the question really is, can we explain how a 350-pound tiger to leap a 12.5-foot barrier from 33 feet away, or do we need to do some more research?
Inaccuracies (Score:4, Interesting)
Then the tiger's centre of mass is probably about 2.5ft up anyway so it more about being able to jump 33ft flat.
Also speed doesn't translate into distance in this simplistic way either: if it did humans would be almost able to jump the distance (max speed = 26.25mph) which is close as damm it to the 26.7mph required.
There's more going on here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll wait for the Mythbusters segment on this (Score:5, Funny)
Lateral velocity != jumping velocity (Score:5, Insightful)
35 mi/hr across the ground != 26 mi/hr at a 55 deg angle. I'd like to see how they propose converted that lateral velocity to the highly inclined one.
This is high school physics done badly. Very poor analysis.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In any event given the maximum known speed of the tiger it should have been a simple matter to know that it was capable of jumping out of its "cage". Converting lateral velocity to highly incline
Re:Lateral velocity != jumping velocity (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, they use SI [wikipedia.org]. CGS is deprecated, but still appears in lots of older papers, textbooks and the like. Multiple metric systems? The horror!
(Although some would argue that realer physicists just use electronvolts, the speed of light and the Planck constant for everything. Even in situations that don't appreciate it, like tiger attacks. Consider a tiger of mass 8.92*10^37 eV...)
Wait a dog gone minute! (Score:4, Funny)
A word on tiger behavior (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know whether or not those boys taunted the tiger, and honestly, I'm not sure it would have made a difference. But I'm fairly certain the tiger would not have "settled down" after only killing a couple of people, not when the place was filled with fearful, slow two-legged animals acting like "prey". Welcome to the world of wild animals.
blue
Re:A word on tiger behavior (Score:5, Informative)
1. Tigers have practically no natural instincts when it comes to being predators. Tigers in the wild have to be trained by their mothers how to do things like hunt, climb trees, eat properly, etc. These are things that a human cannot teach. Therefore, any tiger born in captivity cannot be released into the wild and survive. It simply does not have the skills necessary.
2. Look at the way these tigers were trained. Just two bites, and then they get their kill. They can eat it whenever they want. Now observe the way that they killed the 40 animals released into the zoo. Killing frenzy? Yes. By all definitions, that's a killing frenzy. But was that killing frenzy a product of their instincts? No! If you've done any research or paid attention to anything about tigers, you would quickly learn that my first point is quite correct and proven. Tigers have no natural instincts when it comes to killing their prey. Again, observe how it was trained to hunt and how it slaughtered the wild animals: in the same fashion. This is because it knows no other way to kill animals. You say, 'welcome to the world of wild animals.' I say, 'welcome to the world of tigers not being properly trained by their human caretakers.' All tigers are in captivity are oversized house cats, and about just as aggressive. This means yes you need to be careful, but it means no they're not just going to kill you because they're hungry.
3. Which leads me to my third point. where you say:
4. You know nothing of tigers. (See opening sentence)
Humor: Mythbusters (Score:3, Funny)
Coming up next on Mythbusters :-).
Absolutely not surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Who cares!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
see, yelling and making yourself larger usually repels predators.
See, tigers are apex predators, very efficient killing machines at the top of the food chain. Tigers are also known to be very territorial. Now, standing and shouting in the full view of the tiger is dominance behaviour, especially if you're looking straight at it. What do you think the natural reaction of a tiger to an invasion of its territory by a creature showing dominant behaviour is going to be?
Note also that most stories of wild tig
He should have just watched this video... (Score:5, Interesting)
The asian elephant in this is about 12' tall. Back story: A tiger escaped from a preserve in India (Kaziranga National Park) and had killed a couple of farm animals. She was training her cubs to hunt. Rangers had found the cubs and took them (which I find incredibly stupid because now she's stressed and looking for them). Riding elephants, they found the female in the brush and tried to tranquilize her, but the dart missed. What happened next [youtube.com] should give you and idea what the jerks in the SF zoo saw.
The elephant trainer survived, but was badly wounded.
Projectile motion (Score:3, Informative)
Clearing a 12.5 ft barrier at 33 ft away just didn't feel intuitively possible, so I found a projectile physics toy to test it:
Projectile Motion [virginia.edu]
In SI, the values are 12 m/s at an angle of 55 degrees with a mass of 160 kg, clearing a 3.8 m barrier at 10 m away.
I had some recollection that 45 degrees was the optimum launch angle, but apparently that maximizes distance, not height. Mass doesn't factor into the calculations unless you include air resistance, which the paper neglects.
The surprisingly sensitive factor is launch velocity. Lose 1 m/s and you smack into the middle of the wall. Gain 1 m/s and clear a 16 ft barrier, landing 52 ft away. It still seems phenomenal to actually get a tiger's horizontal velocity redirected at 55 degrees.
The tiger didn't clear the wall (Score:3, Interesting)
This just in - Stop the presses (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So he taunted... why difference does it make? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, climbing over the fence to deliberately provoke a large predator and whatnot... totally the zoo's fault.
the tiger had superior knowledge of the situation (Score:5, Insightful)
The tiger, obviously, disagreed with you. I submit that the tiger had better knowledge of the extent and degree of taunting that you do.
Re:the tiger had superior knowledge of the situati (Score:5, Insightful)
Taunting a tiger is a bit like running down the street screaming the N word in Harlem: there are much, much safer ways to be a jackass.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
the 12-footx30-foot distance is supposed to remind you that this cat means business
Except, apparently, the Zoo knew that the 12 foot wall was four feet short of recommended guidelines for containing a healthy man-eating tiger in the presence of the general public. Also, the Zoo should quite rationally be fully aware that in any sample of the general public, there will be jackasses who would like to taunt said cats, and also vulnerable people who are completely innocent nearby, should the tiger still be hungry after eating said jackass.
Re:the tiger had superior knowledge of the situati (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see the problem.
Re:the tiger had superior knowledge of the situati (Score:5, Funny)
Next, they leapt for the lame and wounded; I feared not for I was not hurt.
Next, they leapt for the young and tender; I feared not...
THERE WAS NO TAUNTING (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
House cats can easily jump a 6-foot wall. I see it all the time here in Phoenix, where all our back yards are separated by 6-foot block walls, and it's common to see cats running a
Re:So he taunted... why difference does it make? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if I saw a guy taunting animals at the zoo I'd think he was a complete jerk. If it was really out of hand, I'd call security to arrest the guy.
But it's not something he deserved to die for.
It is a good habit not to blame the victim of a crime. But no real crime occurred here. He was just the victim of an accident that he caused. This should be repeated in every story discussing this event as a warning to any other stupid individual who thinks taunting tigers is harmless.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Ob. Simpsons: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So he taunted... why difference does it make? (Score:5, Funny)
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You are not going to the right zoos then.....
Re:So he taunted... why difference does it make? (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's a mitigating factor. The tiger didn't attack some random person, this guy was doing something to provoke the attack. That puts the attack in a different category. Both categories are bad in this case, but they are still different.
A well designed enclosure would have prevented this. The zoo is at fault. There is no question there.
However, the guy wasn't innocent. The tiger may not have attacked if he was behaving differently. There is a risk when you tease a 350lb killing machine. I see the fact he was doing that as important.
Your point is a bit like "sure he was kicking the dog, but that doesn't make it OK that the dog mauled him". Just because the result (mauling) was worse than the crime (kicking the dog) doesn't mean the crime is irrelevant.
Now teasing a tiger is not as bad as kicking a dog... the tiger isn't actually injured. The point is that the guy is not without blame.
If I had kids, I'd rather they heard this story with that fact, and would get the chance to learn the lesson "don't taunt things that can easily kill you, even if you think you're safe" than either never learn that lesson or learn it the hard way.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What kind of enclosure would you actually need to keep an enranged and adrenaline fueled tiger in though.
However, the guy wasn't innocent. The tiger may not have attacked if he was behaving differently. There is a risk when you tease a 350lb killing machine. I see the fact he was doing that as important.
The way all mammals respond to threats is known as "flight or flight". Predators are likely to tend
Re:So he taunted... why difference does it make? (Score:4, Interesting)
One that is several feet taller than this one was would have done it. Adrenaline isn't magic, and its performance boost is finite. It obeys the laws of physics like everything else.
The fact that the tiger was enraged doesn't mean that no cage could have held her. The sort of unlimited rage bonus your question seems to imply only comes into play if the tiger has been exposed to gamma rays.
A lot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems clear to me that you build a tiger exhibit in a way that doesn't require the tiger's continued good will to keep it inside.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What if a child with a limp walks by the tiger enclosure? Or someone with a bandaged wound? Or a stray dog gets into the zoo and barks at the tiger?
What if these jerks had been teasing the tiger on a day when the zoo was full of people instead of a holiday when there was almost no one present?
And actually there WAS a case of a stray dog being attacked by a tiger [google.com] in Tennessee. However that was because the dog (also not big on brains) swam across the moat. Apparently he didn't read the "objects are large
Re:A lot (Score:5, Insightful)
1) distract the cat from sleeping,
2) make it get up,
3) make it target you,
4) make it risk its own safety to jump out of its "den" to attack you,
5) make it actually attack, and
6) make it track you hundreds of feet past many other potential targets, now that it's free.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If you are going to attack a large predator which both outmasses you and can run much faster than you then you really don't want to use a weapon which will simply annoy it.
Re:A lot (Score:4, Insightful)
Let the tiger kill 1 person, 100 people, 1000 people, it is a fucking TIGER people, not a bunny rabbit, it was born to do one thing only, KILL! DO NOT expect it to do anything else if its free, and sure as fuck don't kill it for doing so, tranquilize it for crying out loud. Any tiger left on the face of the planet is worth 1,000,000 times more than any human, they are endangered, WE ARE NOT.
They DID NOT have slingshots. (Score:3, Informative)
1) This is the same tiger (Tatiana) that attacked and seriously injured a zookeeper [sfgate.com] (Lori Komejan) who was only doing her job just one year ago. The zoo initially blamed the attack on the zoo keeper.
From a later article [sfgate.com]:
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Here's from the initial article. If the cage was built properly, Tatiana would not have been able to stick her paws through the bars and grab the zookeeper.
Maybe you (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So he taunted... why difference does it make? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see. On an average day at the zoo, there are several thousand people who visit this enclosure. During all the years this enclosure has been around and has had a tiger of some sort in it, not one person has ever been attacked, let alone killed.
Then one day, after drinking and some drug use, [cnn.com] these asshats decide to stand on a fence around the enclosure, yell and taunt at a wild animal which is known to be able kill humans, possibly shoot it with a slingshot, and yet somehow, despite the actions of supposedly the smartest animal on the planet, it's not the guy's fault he got himself killed?
But it's not something he deserved to die for.
It's called being responsible for your actions. Put another way, survival of the fittest in all its glory.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
-- the citizens of Todos Santos
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe the thing that bothers most people, why they seem to imply that the guy got what was coming to him, is that the animal was behind bars and the guys were torturing it verbally and possibly with a slingshot [begin slingshot debate now]. Would the guy have done the same thing to a large breed dog he saw walking down the street? Probably not. But some vodka and an animal enclosure turns the guys into George of the Jungle.
When push comes to shove do most people think the guy really deserved death?
Re: (Score:3)
Yes it is. Fuck that sick little shit, he absolutely deserved to die. Just ask yourself what kind of horrible mind it takes to enjoy teasing an animal that we've already put in a cage. Just how would you feel if somebody stuck you in a jail cell for your whole life, for no reason at all as far as you know, and then started flinging shit at you? Oh, and don't forget, you're 350-pounds of concentrated kinetic death.
I for one am glad that that fuckhead's cruelty is gone. The absolute foolishness and lack of r
Re:So he taunted... why difference does it make? (Score:5, Insightful)
We had a long discussion about this in torts.. (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, the subject here is one of civil liability. The kids - all under the age of 18 - all had alcohol and marijuana in their bloodstream at the time of the incident (according to police reports). Their alleged taunting could be used against them, not to completely excuse the zoo from guilt (although they'll try), but to reduce the damages. Generally speaking as to torts, a jury can find a defendant partially liable for their own injuries.
Re:Darwin award contender? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is saying he deserved to die. If you take risks with your life and the risk doesn't pay off.. well tough.
Re:Darwin award contender? (Score:5, Insightful)
And, they're right.
Here's a list of other stuff (in case you weren't following all the articles) they did just that day;
- waited for the Zoo to empty out (premeditated)
- collected tools to do the task (slingshot, and something else (i forgot)
- drove drunk (open container of vodka in the car) to the zoo
- stayed around after zoo was closed (trespassing)
- climbed over a barrier designed to protect animals from humans
- lied to police about what happened
- clamed up, lawyered up right away
Those asshats deserved to die just from the drunk driving alone. Acting in such a way that causes an endangered animal to be killed brutally by police, while two of them (India-Indians) should know damn well what tigers can do, yeah, that pretty much adds up to NO sympathy.
These asshats deserved to die. Just like those asshats that drove off the end of the Travolta's runway deserved to die. The human race is better off without them.
This is not just kids fooling around tying cans to the neighbor's dogs tail. It's real, bona fide criminal activity and animal abuse.
Re:The sickest part about the tiger attack... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can blame the zoo and blame the human, but the the tiger was innocent - the tiger was the victim here. Do not loose sight of this fact.