When I read the news that the dark-haired half of Siegfried and Roy Las Vegas show was dragged off stage by one of their white ‘friends? I thought, ‘There’s a column in there somewhere.?
Roy Horn, 59, was bit in the arm, then dragged off stage by the white tiger Montecore, in front of an audience of a few hundred people. The big cat’s jaws were clamped on the man’s throat.
Hmm.
I went through all the mental motions of coming up with something witty or pithy. But, skintight leggins and wide-collared satin shirts aside, it’s kinda hard to come up with something humorous when a guy is clinging to life in a Vegas hospital. Still, I was able to come up with one bit of advice, that being, you can never trust whitey.
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I got on-line and Google-searched Roy Horn and then did another for animal attacks. Did you know that the Roy half of the Siegfried and Roy show, while growing up in postwar Germany (he was born on October 3, 1944) had a wolf-dog as a pet? The dog was called Hexe. Roy also helped feed the animals at a local zoo. By the time he was 13 he got a job as a bellhop aboard a cruise ship — that’s where he met the blond half of the show, Siegfried Fischbacher.
Siegfried was a magician — and so the story goes, Roy suggested to blondy that making a cheetah disappear would be more exciting than a desappearing rabbit. Siegfried agreed and the young Roy then went out and smuggled a cheetah from the zoo.
The rest is history. The flamboyant duo went to Vegas in 1970 and have entertained millions of people since.
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I wanted to find out if Roy had been attacked before, to my astonishment the answer was no. The quote I found was, ‘not even a scratch? by any of the animals in all those decades of animal handling. That doesn’t mean all animal handlers were as fortunate. I found a site called circus.com, put out by the good folk from PETA.
I counted about 250 big-cat/people incidents since 1990. There had been 24 big cat/people problems so far this year, prior to Roy’s attack. In that same time PETA reported there were about 150 primate/people incidents and something less than 100 between bears and people.
These reports, of course, are between people and incarcerated critters. And, it’s from PETA, so take it for what it is worth. They want all animals to be free to eat each other in the wild.
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When I think of animal attacks I, and maybe you, think of attacks on people by wild critters or domesticated dogs gone bad. I think of all those biting sharks off the coast of Florida a few years ago. I think of the occasional camper that gets eaten by a mountain lion or grizzly bear. I think of the golfer in Florida that tries to retrieve his golf ball that is sitting next to an alligator and loses his hand.
(Hmm — sharks, Florida, alligators, Florida . . . I think retiring in Florida is crossed off the potential homestead list.)
I found a site called the Animal Attack Files (www.igorilla.com/gorilla/animal). This site has news reports of animal attacks from across the globe and I was caught off guard by a story on magpies.
What are magpies? They are birds. And in the town of Canberra, Australia a few years back there were a reported 254 magpie attacks on people. I don’t know about you, but as the movie Jaws bummed me out about ocean swimming and sharks, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds has affected me on our fine feathered friends.
I like birds through binoculars and not near my head, so this magpie report disturbs me. I guess I can cross off visiting the good people of Canberra, too. By the way, the report also said, the birds more often than not attacked during mating season and that redheads and moms pushing strollers were most attacked.
Go figure.
This site also had stories of rats as big as cats in Chicago, killer bee attacks in Southern California as well as squirrel disturbances in England. I guess my places to visit list is getting shorter by the minute.
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