A man who climbed into a tiger habitat at Yorkshire Wildlife Park on a busy Saturday afternoon was killed after the resident Siberian tiger, Altai, attacked him. Eyewitnesses said the man had posed for a photograph beside the enclosure before scaling a 1-metre-high viewing barrier and dropping into the space below.
The incident has left the park closed on Monday and prompted a health and safety investigation by a City of Doncaster council spokesperson. Witnesses said the man overpowered a woman who tried to pull him back, before Altai, a 30-stone tiger, was seen pawing at him and he was dragged away and later declared dead at the scene.
The case has sharpened attention on why William Chapman was able to get past the barrier at all, and on how little a determined visitor can be stopped once they decide to cross it. The question matters because this was not an isolated scare: 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.
Cambridgeshire police said this week that its investigation into the June incident was still under way and that a 30-year-old man from Norfolk, who was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, had been bailed until 17 December. Against that backdrop, zoo safety experts are trying to explain how two serious breaches could happen within months while still saying the sector’s barriers and controls are generally robust.
Jo Judge said two incidents had happened in the last few months and that it was upsetting and distressing for the sector, while stressing that they were very rare. She said about 32 million people visit BIAZA member zoos and aquariums across Britain and Ireland every year, and argued that the industry has already put in place so many safety measures that these cases should not be read as evidence of a rising problem.
Amy Dickman went further, saying the incidents may reflect wider issues in society rather than a broad failure of zoo practice. She said it is virtually impossible for zoos to stop people who are very determined to breach safety measures, adding that she would not conclude there was a major issue with zoo safety and that walking into that kind of environment can be more dangerous than many people realise. For Yorkshire Wildlife Park, the immediate next step is the investigation; for everyone else, the unanswered question is how many more visitors will test barriers built to keep them alive.
