Man Meets Tiger … And Loses
The Yorkshire Wildlife Park tiger attack is one of the saddest things I’ve covered. A man in his 20s climbed into the tiger enclosure in Doncaster and was attacked by a tiger – he tragically died, and the more you learn, the worse it gets.
At first it looks like another dumb fence-jumper. Then you watch the clip of him asking a total stranger to take a photo of him with the tiger, repeating “one more, one more,” and the eyewitness account of him dancing on the bridge with noise-cancelling headphones on. People online now believe he was autistic, that he was stimming rather than dancing, and that he’d wandered off from his carers. That still hasn’t been officially confirmed.
Then it hits even harder. In the footage, right before the attack, he makes a hand gesture that people have identified as Makaton, the British sign system used by a lot of autistic and non-verbal people. SugarTits and I looked up how Makaton compares to the signs we know, and the sign he appears to be making is “bad.” As in, “bad tiger.”
We also get into whether the tiger should be euthanized (I don’t think so, a tiger’s just being a tiger) and how much of this is on the wildlife park versus the people he was with, how places like Dreamworld’s Tiger Island compare.
Not a funny one, this time. Our hearts goes out to his family. Here’s more from Bearing.
