Weird Trend in Animal News
Is it just me, or has the end of the week turned into a trip down the yellow brick road? Reading the breaking news over the last few days, I have come across weird events involving lions, tigers, and bears respectively, so I cannot resist sharing the tales.
A woman climbed into a lion’s cage at the Memphis Zoo earlier in the week, and was subsequently banned from returning. Apparently she wanted to feed them cookies, sing them songs, and talk about how much she missed them.
“Missed them” because the day they banned her was not the first time she’d tried to interact with the carnivores. She’d been caught before, a few days earlier. Let’s just hope now that she’s banned from the lions she loves, she won’t attempt to be with them again.
In other news, yesterday a Bengal tiger suddenly leaped onto a fishing boat, seized a man on board, and hauled him off into a mangrove swamp as his children looked on. Sushil Manjhi and his son and daughter had been crab fishing in a stream in Sunderbans National Park, in Kolkata, India, when the beast claimed his prize.
Says Manjhi’s son, “The tiger quickly flung my father on his back and gave a giant leap before disappearing into the forest.” He and his sister tried to beat the animal with sticks and a knife, but the tiger was unimpressed as he went on his way. Sushil is presumed dead, and a heartfelt sympathy from me goes out to his kids.
Also reported yesterday, an Alaskan black bear crashed a baby human’s first birthday party to sample the food. Apparently the bear was so interested in attending that it literally climbed onto the roof and broke inside through a skylight there.
The bear was a 180 pound juvenile, and seemed to be familiar with humans since he did not behave in an aggressive manner towards anyone there. Thankfully, the other guests had not yet arrived, so only the parents interacted with the uninvited crasher, who licked frosting off several cupcakes before they managed to shoo him out the back door with the help of some borrowed mace.
Black bears have been known to enter people’s homes before this, as this previous Inquisitr article explains.
