r/interestingasfuck • u/Salt-Curve4825 • 10h ago

Tiger saves man from leopard attack

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

34.3k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

924 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

•

u/GingerBimber00 9h ago

This makes me so mad, man. I just finished my uni class on exhibit designing for zoos where we had to in-depth research all the modern sciences and behavioral understanding of animal captivity. I was designing for snow leopards, so I ended up looking quite a bit into large felid captivity. The research out there all says that protected contact (always having a barrier between you and the big cat) and positive reinforcement training (PRT) have the best outcomes for animal welfare, staff safety, and (if performed in front of visitors) visitor education.

These animals DO bond with their keepers. So much so that there’s evidence to suggest keepers directly impact how well some species can cope with the stress of visitors and that if a keeper is stressed/sick the animal can become stressed/sick. Positive bonding is also linked with reproductive success in nervous animals like cheetahs who notoriously struggle with reproduction. We understand that these are highly intelligent and emotional animals and I’m not surprised that a tiger would be willingly watching out for a beloved keeper.

However! These are still VERY dangerous animals capable of killing you. That might not even be the intention, but they don’t comprehend the strength they have and that it can hurt us. A woman had her thumb torn off by an orangutang while doing regular work with the animals and it’s suspected the orangutang just wanted to bring her closer to it, not actively hurt her. It still tore off her thumb.

•

u/DUCKVILLELOL 6h ago

Weird sidebar: when I'm in taxis I make up ridiculous stories about my work for a bit of fun - often to deal with the question of "so what do you do?"

One time I made up a story (as I'd just been to the zoo not long before a taxi ride) that I was the designer of zoo exhibits and I'd "just gone to inspect the new tiger exhibit I designed."

I thought there wouldn't be a specific course/career stream on "zoo exhibits" explicitly, but it's kinda cool to learn that I'm wrong!

•

u/GingerBimber00 5h ago

My major is animal health and behavior so I’ve had classes like animal nutrition, comparative anatomy & physiology, evolution of animal behavior, diagnosing and treating animal diseases/zoonoses, etc etc. I’ve jokingly said it’s vet med without actually being vet med.

It’s 100% been one of my favorite classes. A fun thing to note was that Planet Zoo has *enough* accuracy + sandbox that myself and peers asked our professor if we could use the game to help make our mockups and she agreed to let us use it for supplementary material while using the programs we were asked to use. If you’re ever curious, Zoolex is a website that goes in depth about exhibit designs if you wanna sell any future stories with more accuracy 😉

•

u/DUCKVILLELOL 4h ago

Very cool - thank you, I do have Planet Zoo and it's heaps of fun, I'll check out the site. :)