Girl scaled barrier to pat cheetah
A 12-year-girl managed to scale a barrier at Wellington Zoo so she could pat a cheetah through a mesh fence.
The girl was part of a school group visiting the park and, in order to reach the cheetah, she ignored a sign not to put hands in the enclosure because ‘‘you will get bitten’’.
She climbed a fence, made her way through a densely planted 1.5-metre-wide garden, then reached through the fence to pat the cheetah. She was not hurt.
The enclosure now has glass walls around it. Cheetahs in captivity are known to react to any ‘‘novelties’’ in their enclosure, and the girl could easily have been mauled, animal behaviour expert Rachael Stratton said.
‘‘They have a natural inclination to either be curious about something near or in the enclosure, or afraid of it. They could also see it as prey to be stalked and eaten,’’ said Stratton, a lecturer in animal behaviour and welfare at Massey University.
Incidents of people getting that close to wild animals were rare in New Zealand, and zoos were very safety conscious.
The girl offered no explanation for her actions, which are revealed among 40 other zoo incidents in the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest annual report.
It includes panda and monkey escapes, and also reveals several break-ins into zoos and
enclosures, including two people who visited an Auckland elephant exhibit after hours.
The incident involving the 12-year-old girl was one of several at Wellington Zoo. Asked whether the zoo could have done more to stop the breach, animal sciences manager Simon Eyre said it had done ‘‘everything possible’’.
The incident followed another earlier in 2014 at the zoo, in which sumatran tiger Rokan charged a child during a tiger-training demonstration for a school group. A keeper had failed to secure a gate, but there was still mesh in the way of the animal.
In February this year, there was an attempted breach of the perimeter fence by a person using wire cutters – but that attempt failed .
There were also three incidents of keepers being bitten by dingos in March. The keepers needed precautionary medical treatment, and the zoo changed its procedures for handling the dogs.
Each incident involved two dingos ‘‘squabbling’’ for dominance, and the keepers were injured when they stepped in.
In that same month, a new female red panda was found in a tree outside the enclosure where it had lived for only 90 minutes. Fences had since been raised.
The report reveals a member of the public broke into Auckland Zoo’s elephant exhibit one night in July last year. That incident was followed by another the next month, though in the second incident there was ‘‘no incursion into animal containment areas’’.
The list of incidents includes multiple butterfly escapes, and one from November last year when five spider monkeys escaped from their enclosure at Orana Wildlife Park in Christchurch.
Park chief executive Lynn Anderson said a rope had come down in big overnight winds and that gave the five female monkeys a ‘‘ladder’’ out of the enclosure.
At Butterfly Creek, near Auckland Airport, an alligator enclosure was briefly left unlocked, but general manager John Dowsett said the building was secure, and the animals were only a metre long at most.
Butterfly Creek had since reviewed its procedures.
In February, a parent lowered a child into a meerkat enclosure at an unnamed zoo, and at another a young brolga crane was startled by machinery, ran across its enclosure and glided over a fence into an alpaca exhibit.