Tigers

It was any zoo's worst nightmare. Shortly after 5 p.m. on Christmas Day, San Francisco Zoo Director Manuel Mollinedo received a call at home: Tigers are on the loose and somebody may have been hurt. "At first I thought it was a practical or sick joke," he recalled in an interview. "But I took it seriously and grabbed my jacket and got in the car and drove to the zoo." Soon, the gravity of the situation became all too clear.

One of the three victims of the San Francisco Zoo tiger attack was intoxicated and admitted standing atop a railing of the big-cat enclosure and yelling and waving at the animal that would later maul them, killing his friend, police said in court documents filed Thursday. Paul Dhaliwal, 19, told the father of Carlos Sousa Jr.

The photos of the South China tiger taken by a farmer seemed too good to be true. After all, no member of the endangered big cat family had been seen in the wild since the 1960s. This weekend, local authorities revealed after months of delay that the pictures had been staged using a poster cutout. Police also produced a paw made of wood they said had been used to make prints in the snow.

Tigers have not fared well in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, they languished in zoo cages, hungry and haggard. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, they survived on scraps provided by sympathetic zookeepers. And after Hussein's ouster in 2003, one of the two tigers in the Baghdad Zoo was shot and killed by a U.S. soldier. With the arrival of two Bengal tigers from a North Carolina sanctuary for endangered animals, Iraqi and U.S. officials are hoping the future is brighter for tigers here.

A former Moorpark couple whose Siberian tiger spent weeks prowling Ventura County neighborhoods before it was eventually hunted down and fatally shot by authorities pleaded guilty Monday to multiple federal charges related to the incident. Gert "Abby" Hedengran, 58, admitted to felony counts of obstruction of justice and making false statements, saying that he lied to federal wildlife agents in February 2005 as they were trying to track down and capture the tiger.

A tiger at the Charles Paddock Zoo was killed by his longtime exhibit mate, zoo officials said. Hoshi, an Indochinese tiger who joined the zoo in fall 2000, was found dead in his den Sunday. Zoo Director Alan Baker said the tiger died from asphyxiation caused by exhibit mate Sala. Laboratory tests are incomplete.

A South China tiger has been caught on camera by a hunter-turned-farmer, the first confirmed sighting in 30 years of a subspecies experts had feared was extinct in the wild, China's official New China News Agency said. Zhou Zhenglong took more than 70 photos of the young tiger lying in the grass in a mountainous part of central China. Experts confirmed the images showed one of the elusive cats.

A tiger that killed four people and mauled two others in the last six weeks was shot to death by police over the weekend, a forestry official in western India said. Officials had said that they would try to trap, tranquilize or drive away the tiger, which had been straying from the Tadoba-Andhari sanctuary in the western state of Maharashtra since mid-October. But after a fourth victim was killed Friday, police sharpshooters killed the animal.

A tiger living at actress Tippi Hedren's wildlife sanctuary mauled a caretaker Monday afternoon, leaving the man in critical condition with multiple bites, a Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman said. The incident occurred about 3 p.m. at Hedren's Shambala Preserve in Acton, which houses about 70 African lions, Siberian and Bengal tigers, leopards, servals, mountain lions and bobcats.

The director of the San Francisco Zoo and the city's police chief said Wednesday that they still didn't know how a tiger managed to escape its enclosure on Christmas Day, mauling a teenager to death and seriously injuring two men. At a news conference just outside the zoo property, Director Manuel Mollinedo said he would bring in outside experts to assess the safety of the outdoor enclosures for lions and tigers.