How High Can Tigers Jump?

By Fred

Since one teenage boy died, two of his friends got mauled, and panicked police murdered in cold blood Tatiana, a young 350-pound Siberian tiger at the San Francisco Zoo, the authorities have tortured themselves wondering how they might have prevented all that bloodshed.

(Photo by Charles Russo)

The attorney for the friends, Mark Geragos, claims the enclosure “couldn’t hold a house cat.” After representing such role models as Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson, he’s now an expert on big cats.

So, were the walls of Tatiana’s enclosure high enough? Does anybody really know? How high can tigers jump?

The answer is obvious to any cat: Tigers can jump as high as they have to.

I’ve never been into daredevil jumping myself, but Yul has been known to casually leap 4 or 5 times his height from a standing position, and Adele can go even farther.

Never underestimate cat power.

We’ll never know what really happened, unless the two survivors come clean, which is unlikely with Geragos involved. One of them has claimed they did nothing; Tatiana just picked them out of the crowd and went postal on them for no reason. But bits of evidence have trickled out. They found a shoe print on the enclosure wall, and someone actually saw the teenagers taunting the tigers. It all indicates that Tatiana had motive.

It’s tragic whenever a human gets shredded, provoked or not, and it’s bad PR for all cats. But it wouldn’t happen if people didn’t insist on confining and gawking at us.

Magnificent cats like the late Tatiana should only be seen on safari, and the only shooting allowed should be with cameras.