Tbilisi zoo tragedy: the pathos of an escaped hippo

The pictures of wild animals being cornered or shot in Tbilisi’s streets were sure-fire magnets of human feeling

Pity is a strange thing. Tragedy in classical theory is supposed to inspire both pity and terror, but the daily horror and violence of world news often leave us struggling to produce those responses. While we might, in principle, be shocked by James Joyce’s irritating character Stephen Dedalus when he says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that a death in a road accident cannot be truly tragic because it is “remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions”, the reality is that no one can really feel on cue the emotions apparently required of us by a daily news stream of anniversaries of bombings and economies on the brink. But a hippo being shot with a tranquiliser dart in a flooded city street is another matter entirely.

Related: The tragedy of Tbilisi zoo – what happened next?

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