The "Tiger Bait" Boys Aren't Talking

Two of the guys who became tiger bait at the San Francisco Zoo aren't talking to anybody about what happened:

SAN FRANCISCO — As a grieving family planned the funeral of a teen killed by a tiger at San Francisco Zoo, the two brothers who could shed the most light on how the attacks occurred have yet to speak out since leaving the hospital.

A 350-pound Siberian tiger killed Carlos Sousa Jr. and seriously hurt two of his friends after escaping from its enclosure. Brothers Paul Dhaliwal, 19, and Kulbir Dhaliwal, 23, suffered severe bite and claw wounds.

The pair were released from the hospital Saturday, leaving through a side door amid a crush of reporters hoping to clear up lingering questions about how the tiger escaped its enclosure Tuesday afternoon and how the attacks occurred. They offered no comment.

According to this story, it may have been common knowledge for many years that the tiger enclosure wouldn't keep the cats in if they didn't want to be there:

"I was putting a sign up in front of the tiger exhibit, with my butt hanging over the edge," said the former keeper. "The cat was pacing back and forth at the bottom of the grotto." The keeper said one of his more seasoned colleagues happened by, grabbed him by the belt loop and jerked him back, away from the edge. "He shared the secret that people knew - the cat could jump up and take me down," the keeper said.

And well known in zoo lore is the story about an entomologist who, as a teenage science student in the late 1950s, visited the tiger grotto with former zoo director Carey Baldwin to see if the enclosure was secure enough to contain the tiger.

"Mr. Baldwin had been told by one of the zookeepers that the tiger might be able to escape by jumping across the moat and onto the flowerbed between the public guard rail and the moat," the entomologist, David Rentz, recalled in a posting on his Web log.

"We got a large piece of meat and tied it to a long bamboo pole and approached the tiger enclosure. We were at the other end of the bamboo pole - about 15 feet away from the meat. Baldwin held the pole at the edge of our side of the moat. Once the tiger saw it, he literally flew across the moat from his position on the other side, grabbed the meat, and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement.

"It happened so quickly that it was hard to believe what we had seen," Rentz said Saturday in a telephone interview from his home in Queensland, Australia. "It scared the hell out of me. It scared the hell out of both of us.

"Then Mr. Baldwin closed the tiger's access to the outside - supposedly forever," Rentz wrote on his Web log. "Notes were left to the zookeepers to never let this tiger outside again."

If it turns out that it's been common knowledge that the tigers could jump out if tempted, the liability issues for the zoo are going to be enormous.

And what do you think was going through the minds of those guys when they dared the cat to come and get them...and she did?

UPDATE: There are reports today that the boys had slingshots which they may have used to taunt the animal...and still their lawyer insists it was the zoo's fault the animal escaped. Funny, the cat hadn't jumped out before at anyone not shooting him with a slingshot. Hmmm...there might be a connection there.