The Doomed Zoo
Our Trilogy of True Animal Terror concludes with the story of a great escape—and the tragedies that followed. “The Doomed Zoo”—a 7-minute listen.
Guliko Chitadze once dreamed of a tiger cage pooled with blood. Men were standing over some mutilated person, but she couldn’t see who it was. As a keeper at the zoo in Georgia’s capital city of Tbilisi, she had reason to worry about bloodshed. By US standards, the zoo wasn’t safe. Its arrangement of bars and fences allowed visitors to get too close to the animals. On more than one occasion, children had approached the tigers and been injured. Chitadze thought her dream was a prophecy of trouble to come.
Her real troubles started soon afterward with a little girl weeping. The girl, a zoo visitor, had accidentally dropped a toy into the tiger cage. Her father was trying to comfort her, telling her he’d buy her a new toy. Chitadze joined them, offering her own words of comfort. The girl was inconsolable. It was at this point the father said he’d go downstairs, to a place where he could reach into the cage and get the toy. Chitadze knew that was an extraordinarily bad idea. She offered an alternative: she’d reach the toy herself.
That, too, was an extraordinarily bad idea. It was against the safety rules; she could get hurt. Still, the girl was crying harder than ever, and Chitadze loved children, though she had none of her own. She wanted to help. The tigers weren’t particularly close to the corner where the toy lay. Probably she could reach in quickly, grab the toy, and be done without the tigers even taking notice.
Once downstairs, she slipped her right hand into the cage. She grabbed the toy and tossed it up and out. The grateful father was able to retrieve it. That’s when the tigers moved, too fast for her to react. One of them reached for her body through the bars. Its claws caught in her dress. She expected the dress to tear away as she pulled back, but it didn’t. Instead, the tiger pulled her to the ground and dragged her tightly against the cage. Another tiger reached out to take her by the hand. A third reached through the cage to bury its claws in her leg. With her free hand, she tried desperately to crawl away. She was held tight. The father screamed and came barreling down the stairs to help. She warned him to stay away, to go for other keepers. The second tiger had driven its claws through the flesh of her hand and was tugging as hard as it could to draw her into the cage. The pain was, she said, “soul-squeezing.” Of course, she could only have fit through the bars in pieces.
Suddenly she pulled her arm free. She was clear of the cage in an instant. Her right arm had no flesh from the elbow down. She lay there, nearly unconscious, as a veterinarian who worked at the zoo arrived to help. He tore his shirt into strips and tied one of them snugly around her upper arm, trying to stop the spurting blood. Otherwise, she’d die in minutes. She wobbled on the edge of consciousness, hearing everything around her. She had used this now-skeletal hand, she reflected, to raise a tigress named Salima from infancy. Salima was the mother of the three who had mauled her. She later claimed that Salima had come to her aid, had batted the three younger tigers aside to protect her.
At the hospital, doctors had to amputate most of the ruined arm. Chitadze made plans. She’d use a prosthetic arm to continue caring for the zoo animals.
She had already returned to work a month later when the waters began to rise. It was the spring of 2015; heavy rain swelled the Vere River. At Tbilisi, the dam broke. Cars floated sideways in the streets. Living rooms filled with mud. In places, the bank crumbled into the river, tearing apart the houses that had stood on top. People were swept away. The death toll eventually rose to 19. The flood struck the zoo as well. Despite her injury, Chitadze swam into flooded areas to rescue animals. She drowned in the attempt.
Some animals escaped their ruined cages. Wolves, bears, tigers, and eight lions were loose in the city. A bear was spotted on a second-story window ledge. A hippopotamus trotted through a major city square. Authorities warned people to stay indoors, or at least to stay away from garbage bins where the animals might come to scavenge a meal or wooded areas where they might hide. The hippo was shot with a tranquilizer dart and recaptured, as were some of the other escapees. But there were too few trained workers to cope with the mass escape. Police began to shoot the animals on sight. They felt the animals, especially the big carnivores, posed a threat to human lives. In that belief, they were right. Soon the Prime Minister of Georgia announced that all the dangerous animals had been captured or killed. In that belief, he was wrong.
Two days later, a party of workers entered a warehouse near the zoo to check for water damage. A white tiger sprang from the shadows. It had been hiding in the warehouse, and since all the large animals were thought to have been accounted for, no one expected danger. The tiger attacked one of the workers, a 43-year-old man. It bit him in the throat, severing a carotid artery. By the time he reached the hospital, he’d bled to death. Another worker suffered lesser injuries.
Police hunted the tiger down and shot it to death. As the prime minister apologized for the mistaken announcement, authorities learned that a hyena and another tiger might still be on the loose. It seemed only about half of the zoo’s 600 animals were alive and contained. Meanwhile the clean-up continued, with daily revelations of strange sights: The muddy carcasses of drowned bears. The elegant legs of an ostrich protruding from the ground. Paw prints in rusty mud. Empty cages pooled with rain.
