Planning for tiger attacks
Tigers can be a real threat. They have killed substantial numbers of people over the years. Beautiful as they are, the experience of even trained folk such as Sigfreid and Roy should still give one pause. While those who own cats may occasionally get scratched or bitten, the stakes are really upped when the cat weighs hundreds of pounds, and is not, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, domesticated.
It has been estimated that as many as 3 out of every thousand tigers might eventually attack a human. While some simple measures, such as wearing a mask on the back of the head (tigers almost always attack an unsuspecting human from behind) work for a while, tigers are not stupid, and learn to distinguish between a person walking backward and a man wearing a mask.
There are, of course, other threats that are even greater. As an example, for every person killed by a tiger, a hundred die from snakebites! And as dangerous as tigers and snakes might be, lions can be worse. In one case, a pride of lions killed more than a thousand people over a fifteen-year period. And in Alaska, the barren ground grizzly killed ten people in 2000. This may not sound like many, but it is when you consider the low human population density in the area. And the fact is that the barren ground grizzly does not think of humans as prey, but, rather, simply doesn’t like us.
We are proud to say that we have never suffered a tiger attack at any LUBRINCO office, nor have we ever lost a client to a tiger attack. Nor, thankfully, to anything else, either!
What, you might ask, is the secret of our success in dealing with the tiger threat? In spite of the title, it is not our not-inconsiderable planning skills and experience, but, rather, the fact that, outside of a zoological garden, neither we nor our clients have ever been anywhere near a tiger. Indeed, the closest we have ever come to a wild animal here in Gotham was when we left our Manhattan apartment one morning and discovered, in the children’s park next to where we lived, roughly twenty New York City police, guns drawn, facing down a baby deer. If a fawn can appear in Manhattan and terrorize a neighborhood (save for the kids, who thought it was adorable), why not a tiger?
The point of this is that when protective measures are taken, they should have some strong relationship to threats faced. Notwithstanding the level of danger involved in a tiger attack, not a penny should be spent by any protective team in Manhattan – and most of the rest of the world – in protecting from tigers. Or other specific threats of equally low probability.
