To worry about lions and other dangerous animals escaping at the zoo?

[climbingquickly]

Around the lion enclosures there is an narrow raised walkway that gives you a better view as the top of enclosure is open. You enter walkway via metal gates, it's divided into several sections, each with a set of gates. On each gate is a sign: 'If animal in walkway area, do not enter and alert a member of staff' with a sort of stop-sign featuring a lion on the walkway!! AIBU to think this isn't very safe and means lions could jump out?

Also the rhinoceros kept charging at the fence as if to escape (only a shallow ditch in front of fence)...

Anyone else get nervous at these places?

I was at a talk last year the man doing it said its the cute ones you need to worry about they had marmosets that went for the eyes those tufty eared cuties will blind you

Cotton top tamarins? Oh yes, v. cute.

Posts like Bottleofbeer's are the reason I love Mumsnet

I've seen a coyote in my garden (Chicago suburbs). They are basically like foxes. I assume they could attack a cat or small dog maybe, but I doubt they'd harm a human. Raccoons on the other hand are nasty little creatures, but they are so cute!

Chimps are neither cute nor cuddly.
They are devious and murderous shaggers. Or is it bonobos? I keep confusing them.

Bonobos shag all the time a chimp could kill you not sure if they can plot your murder though

They could as a group. I'm pretty sure I've read something about it.

Vindictive little shits. (and only, what 1% different from us... )

Bonobos are notorious shaggers, but are generally not murderous - they are the pacifists of the chimp family. The shagging is a manifestation of that - very much Make Love Not War.

Do you live anywhere near Oklahoma City OP?

I do! Last night was really quite surreal with the tornado sirens going off non-stop, flash flooding, then the news of tigers on the loose.

There was a tiger escape at Oklahoma City Zoo last week too.

Very scary. The weather even more than the tigers. You've just made me look up and start crying all over again .

Thanks Limited ... my face seems to be leaking from the tear ducts

Bonobos creep me out they do weird squeaks and look like hairy humans its just too close to us for my liking

QOD

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more."

"Are you able to comprehend what happened here?"

Stupid condescending reporter.

This was the woman who had a "game plan", fgs.

Upon hearing the tornado sirens: "Well, Toto, guess I was wrong, this seems a lot like Kansas to me".

The woman dealt with it with grace and just the right amount of scorn, but I don't think she was hostile.

As a stupid condescending reporter myself, you do say the stupidest things. It's because you are dropped into situations that you have no understanding of that are frequently shocking.

Your job is try to understand and convey it to a similarly ignorant audience who will be lucky enough not to experience that. Not everyone in the US and the wider world experiences that form of extreme devastation. And if you are doing live TV there's no taking back your daft words.

I'd defy anyone else to do differently.

Similarly, the much derided question: 'How do you feel?'

People often scoff: 'How do you think she'd feel?' but that's the danger. If you don't ask how people feel, you ignore them or worse, put words in their mouths.

Sorry Lweji. I'm not getting at you. It's just because of my job I feel very strongly about that.

Because of my job I also have grown a very thick skin too

You're right geekymummy. Tornado corridor. This is where people live. I can't comprehend it. I get a bit leery if the pavements are a bit slippy.

Wider western world, I should say.

Coverage of tornado season and earthquakes in the US usually centres on how well-adapted first-world nations are to that kind of thing.

Apart from Katrina.

The outcry about that including reporting and dramas such as Treme was very valuable in bringing it over to me as someone living in the mild climate and relatively mild social set up of the UK.

Coverage of tornado season and earthquakes in the US usually centres on how well-adapted first-world nations are to that kind of thing.

Coverage of tornadoes and earthquakes tends to be very local in nature, unless there is a very large tornado outbreak or a very large earthquake. A tornado in Kansas isn't going to be front page news here in Pittsburgh, because tornadoes aren't that rare in Kansas, and they don't really affect most people in Pittsburgh.

Part of what causes this is that the US is a very big place. The distance from Pittsburgh to Kansas City (which is on the near side of Kansas to me) is 841 miles. That's about twice the distance between London and Edinburgh. Also, Kansas (and most of the middle of the US in general) is not densely populated, so tornadoes there don't tend to kill a lot of people (there are, of course, exceptions).

Same goes for earthquakes. Most earthquakes, even in places like California or Alaska where they're not infrequent, are small. An earthquake in the 5-5.9 range might damage some poorly built buildings, but it probably isn't going to cause enough destruction to be national news. Smaller earthquakes in places that don't typically get earthquakes tend to be bigger news, because places that don't normally get earthquakes don't have the same building codes that places like California do, so damage is more likely. Third-world countries, of course, tend to have even less stringent building codes than places in the US where earthquakes generally don't happen.

Hurricane Katrina was, of course, very different. It was actually very different from most hurricanes. It was a severe hurricane (Category 5 on a category 1-5 scale), it hit a major city, and it hit a city that happens to largely be below sea level. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the US since 1928, of course it was a major news event. Hurricanes in general get more national news coverage than tornadoes or earthquakes, because they tend to affect larger areas.

Viva that means your local zoo is also my local zoo. We live about a twenty minute drive away and half of that is the entranceway road you have to do at 5mph. DS is there with school next week.

I might have to volunteer now, to make sure they/I know where the bears are while he's there.

This thread has turned me into my mother and made me worry about escape. The lions have been her biggest worry for years. Before them she worried about random escaped gorillas, even though there are none locally as far as I know. She used to be convinced that if one did ever escape, from anywhere, it would make a beeline for our bathroom window and break in.

We saw a lemur escape once, from the zoo they used to have near Crewkerne in Somerset. It escaped from it's enclosure and went to the cafe, and spent a happy ten minutes sitting in the bin eating leftovers before making it's own way back to the enclosure for feeding time You could just see this long black and white tail poking out the top of the swing bin lid.

There was an old chap playing boules killed by a runaway elephant recently in France. Imagine that, you make it to 84 and that's the way you go.

Was the dog footage from 2013? I've never seen it before. How sweet!

The big tornado in 2013 happened about 2 months after we moved to Oklahoma. When we drove through Moore about a week later it was difficult to comprehend the destruction, despite seeing it with our own eyes. Yes, Oklahoma is used to tornados, but big ones like that are rare. For all the chaos last night, no one was killed and only one person was injured.