Saturday, July 14, 2007

Wild Life in the City

Yesterday while I was watching TV, they had a promo about the 11:00 pm news. The catchy phrase was, Elephants wander around suburban neighborhood. My immediate thought was, oh no, not again.

About 12 years ago, when the Cole Bros. circus was performing in Forest Park in Queens, NY one elephant bumped into another elephant who seemed to take offense and the two of them stormed out of the tent and went running along the road in the Park. Naturally, the audience was frightened and tried to get out of their way. About a dozen people were treated for minor injuries. The two elephants were then retired to Florida.

Evidently this circus is not too careful with their animals. Back in 2004, again in Forest Park, a 450 pound rare, white Bengal tiger slipped out of his cage and headed out of the park around 1:00 pm. The tiger caused panic by prancing by a picnic, then roamed toward the Jackie Robinson Parkway. He caused two collisions involving a total of five cars before jumping on the hood of a car and exiting the parkway. He was finally lured back into his cage by a large piece of raw meat about a mile from the park.

Five people were seriously hurt in the tiger episode.

The elephants in yesterday's story were in Toronto and I don't believe they were part of that circus. Evidently their stroll was during the night and all they did was damage a garden. They probably just wanted a midnight snack.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Forest Park. That was a great park back in the 40's and 50's. It was big. It had lots of shade from the trees. There was a merry-go-round, picnic tables, sports fields. I hope people are still enjoying it as much as I did.