How far some Chinese tourists go to avoid zoo entrance charges
Dicing with death by climbing around tiger and lion enclosures just some of the lengths people will go to get free entry
Two Chinese women and a man, hoping to avoid paying entrance fees, scaled a fence at a zoo in the central city of Changsha, Hunan province on Saturday, only to find themselves metres away from the gate to an area where tigers roam freely, according to a local TV report.
The three were quickly spotted by zoo staff on closed-circuit TV and escorted to safety, and the zoo has left the case in the hands of the local police.
“If they had wrongly scaled the fence and entered the tiger roaming zone, their lives would have been threatened,” Zhang Bin, an official who supervises security in the zoo, told Changsha TV.
The zoo takes all visitors round by specially protected buses, and Zhang said that because the three were close to the gate, it might have been possible for the tigers to get out and attack them when the gate opened to let a bus in.
“They just did not want to pay for the tickets,” Zhang said.
