wolf attack on zookeeper

“(CNN) — A female zookeeper died Sunday morning when she was attacked by wolves in an enclosure at the Kolmarden Zoo in Sweden.

The zookeeper was a longtime employee at the wildlife park and had worked with the group of wolves since they were born, the zoo said in a statement on its website.

The attack happened during a routine visit to the wolves’ enclosure, designed to ‘maintain contact with the wolves.'”

These things happen, of course. And you can write it off statistically as a built-in hazard of the profession that doesn’t happen often enough to worry about. Or, you can view it instead as part of the karmic penalty humans pay for confining wild animals in zoos. I was just speaking with a family member who avoids zoos for this very reason, and there are quite a number of people who avoid zoos, dolphin shows, and other such events for this very reason.

Fair enough. But what strikes me immediately upon reading the story this time is the human tragedy of it. Everyone dies someday, and perhaps everyone hopes it is peacefully in their sleep after a long and fulfilling life. Relatively few people die anymore from animal attacks, and it must be a horrifying way to spend your final minutes on earth. You’d probably rather be carjacked by armed humans, with the thought that you might be able to reason with them or appeal to some buried core of pity in them before they pull the trigger. But you’d be devoid of any such hope if alone in a pen with wolves that suddenly turned on you.

Add in the fact that she presumably had some affection for these particular wolves, having known them since birth, and it’s a terrifying thing to think about, even if you believe with absolute certitude that zoos are a moral outrage against animals.