CALGARY -- Short of actually basting your sleeve with gravy beforehand, sticking your arm in a tiger's cage is about as stupid as it gets.
He's an idiot, a moron, a rube and an imbecile -- and not very bright to boot.
Brainless behaviour: It's been the focus of discussion ever since two fools scaled the eight-foot fence at the Calgary Zoo, and then decided a midnight visit to the tigers was in order.
One arm mauling later, police and an ambulance arrived, and the person who's very likely the first tiger-mauling victim in Calgary history was off to the hospital.
Word is, he may lose the arm, as Siberian tigers aren't known for their subtle touch.
And again, there's little sympathy -- an arm is a dear price for being silly, but it's the cost of trying to shake hands with a tiger. He should have known better.
And so it's agreed, Calgary's first tiger victim is a total dolt.
But is that really all we learned here?
Something else is being missed in the rush to chastise the two burglars who tangled with Calgary's tigers -- and that's the safety of the animals inside the zoo.
If people are capable of slipping past security to get within touching distance of a tiger, the potential for harm goes both ways.
Imagine a rifle in the hands of one of these zoo invaders -- it's no more far-fetched than someone climbing into the zoo and sticking their arm in the tiger den.
Sadly, there's past precedent for people hurting zoo animals.
Last October, a seven-year-old boy broke into a popular Australian zoo, bashing several animals to death with a rock, and feeding other creatures to the zoo's resident crocodile.
The boy jumped a security fence at the Alice Springs Reptile Centre, and proceeded to kill 13 animals over the course of half an hour.
Calgary is no newcomer to late-night vandalism and break-ins.
A decade back, a British soldier who crept inside the zoo for an after-hour visit ended up being badly mauled by a polar bear.
The squaddie dropped his smokes inside the pen, and shimmied down a tree to retrieve them -- and that's when a polar bear decided to claw his leg, shredding it.
Then there was the arson attack which took place in 2002.
Arson investigators sifted through reels of security camera footage, but no one was ever arrested for starting the fire which destroyed the $3 million Northern Forest Lodge, killing 10 animals inside.
It's believed three teens entered the zoo during regular hours, hiding until the facility closed before starting the fire, which was reported by motorists passing by. Of course, questions of zoo security arose then too, but were brushed aside.
The official line then, as it was during yesterday's press conference on the tiger mauling, is the zoo can't possibly keep out a determined intruder.
"I think it is fair to say that if anybody puts their mind to it, they certainly can breach any kind of security and that seems to be the case here," said Calgary Zoo spokesman Grahame Newton.
And that, from the perspective of protecting the animals, is scary. The fact two men managed to scale a fence barely taller than themselves, and then creep through the zoo without triggering any sort of alarm, suggests a system that isn't secure at all.
Newton said four security guards were on duty at the zoo at the time of the presumably noisy tiger attack -- yet no one was aware a man had been mauled until the victims phoned for help themselves.
Like the fire noticed by motorists a few years before, it shows the zoo's monitoring of its own property is incomplete and inadequate -- and for the creatures inside, that's unacceptable.
The security fence is clearly too low, while cameras, motion detectors and human guards are too few, or totally ineffective.
The Calgary Zoo can continue to shrug off such break-ins as rare and unavoidable, until the day comes when the facility is forced to deal with a real tragedy, be it human or animal.
No security system is perfect, but the current laissez-faire attitude is a recipe for disaster, and an open invite to every idiot who wants to try and pet a tiger -- or worse.
It's a jungle out there, and the Calgary Zoo needs to do more to keep it outside.
