From the News: Florida Man Hospitalized After Jumping Into Jaguar Exhibit at Zoo

Florida Man Hospitalized After Jumping Into Jaguar Exhibit at Zoo

I'm really going to have to stop featuring idiots like this in "From the News"... because it seems like this is happening so often that it's hardly newsworthy.  Anyway, the headline is sensationalist and a bit inaccurate - they guy wasn't actually in the exhibit with the jaguar.  If he was, he most likely wouldn't have gotten out.  Instead, this is fairly similar to the incident from Wildlife World Zoo in Arizona a few years back - dummy crosses barrier, reaches through fence, predictable result.  As Deputy Zoo Director Dan Maloney told the press with considerable understatement, "This is an individual that wasn't using his head..."

The Jacksonville Zoo is regarded as having perhaps the best jaguar habitat in the US; it's certainly long been one of my favorites.  I don't consider it to be in anyway unsafe, assuming that visitors are actually following the rules.  I hope that the zoo doesn't respond to this by putting up additional barricades that will limit visitor access to seeing the animals.  Most of us know how to behave, after all.