Tiger attack not unprecedented

Monday, Oct. 6, 2003 | 9:20 a.m.

The mauling of Siegfried & Roy animal handler Roy Horn wasn't the first such attack in Las Vegas.

A trainer was seriously injured in an incident in October 1996, and a handler was killed by a tiger on March 25, 2001.

In the 1996 incident, Charlie Stagnaro, 65, a trainer at the Keepers of the Wild sanctuary, was feeding 8-year-old Bonnie, a Bengal tiger, when the tiger attacked him, resulting in surgery on his feet and legs. He was mauled while feeding the animal in the sanctuary in the 4000 block of Dewey Drive.

In the 2001 incident handler Eric Bloom, 25, was mauled to death by a 300-pound Bengal tiger at a Mount Charleston facility that later was closed by local officials who discovered it had been operating unlawfully for more than two years.

Bloom was killed almost instantly when the tiger named Jagger turned and bit his neck -- similar to what happened to Horn -- in what Metro Police investigators termed an accident. Jagger was retired from show business to be used for breeding.

With Friday's incident Horn joins a growing list of performers and handlers who have become prey to the tigers they dominated.

Perhaps the most famous -- outside of Horn -- was Mabel Stark, a Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus star of the early 20th century, whose life was chronicled in the Robert Hough book "The Final Confession of Mabel Stark," which is slated to be made into a movie.

Although she stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed only about 100 pounds, Stark controlled during a single performance several big cats, each of whom were six times bigger than she was.

During her shows, Rajah, a Bengal tiger Stark had raised from a cub, would leap on her back and the two would roll on the ground, stunning crowds. However, performing tigers in those days were not declawed and, as a result, Stark suffered at least a dozen serious maulings, Hough wrote.

Hough recounted one incident where Stark suffered broken limbs and was pinned to muddy ground by a tiger that chewed on her stomach. She had to undergo several surgeries over several years following the incident, Hough wrote.

Perhaps not as famous but more recently amateur handler Antoine Yates, 31, faces reckless endangerment charges after police had to remove a 400-pound tiger and an alligator from his Manhattan apartment Saturday.

The 20-month-old Siberian-Bengal mix had been in Yates' apartment since he was 6 weeks old. The tiger and alligator were being sent wildlife preserves in Ohio and Indiana.

The accounts of recent incidents involving experienced handlers mauled or killed by tigers, as culled from news accounts and the Internet, mirror what happened to Horn. They include:

The American Zoo and Aquarium Association estimates that there are 15,000 captive tigers in private hands in the United States -- about three times the number of tigers living in the wild worldwide.

Because of backyard breeding in the United States, tiger cubs have become more popular as pets in recent years, selling for $350 for a common Bengal cub to as much as $100,000 for a white tiger, according the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA says that since 1990, at least six adults and two children have been killed by so-called pet tigers in the United States and more than 60 others have been seriously mauled by them.

The Associated Press

contributed to this story.