This is the stuff that Joyce Carol Oates’ stories are made on: your son visits the zoo and a tiger rips his throat out. In case you somehow missed the media frenzy, this past Christmas day a 250-pound Siberian tiger (regally named “Tatiana”) leaped the 12-foot wall of her enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo and attacked17-year-old Carlos Sousa Jr. and his two friends, killing Carlos and wounding the others before the police arrived and shot her to death with their handguns. The incident was all the more disturbing to Bay Area residents because at first, no one had any idea how Tatiana got out of her enclosure, or even if the three young men were her only victims. That night, firefighters on ladders combed the treetops with high-powered flashlights, looking for more corpses and more escaped animals. In the panic and confusion of the moment, it must have seemed like the city was about to be overrun.

And while, for me, there is a certain eerie fascination in imagining Tatiana loose from her cage, prowling the asphalt paths and gardens, the most bizarre part of the whole adventure is the way that San Franciscans reacted to the killing. If readers’ responses to tiger coverage on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website are any barometer of public opinion, many San Franciscans seem to be rooting for the tiger. One poster suggested that the two survivors be thrown into the pit along with their lawyers. While a few expressed their sympathy for Sousa’s family, it was the tiger that most posters seemed to be grieving, writing “R.I.P. Tatiana.” Locals even held a vigil on Ocean Beach.

An astonishing amount of police-work and reporting went into assigning blame to the two surviving victims, brothers Paul and Kulbir Dhaliwal. Zoo officials insisted that Tatiana wouldn’t have attacked the boys if she hadn’t been provoked, despite the fact that the same tiger mauled a zoo keeper last year at the same time. I wonder: is Christmas an especially stressful time for tigers? Do they pick up on the ambient psychosis that is the Christmas season, and just freak out? There’s a Macy’s in San Francisco’s Union Square where every year the magic of Christmas is celebrated by unscrewing the glass dome on top of the building and lowering in a fifty-foot tall evergreen ripped out of some forest. Maybe Tatiana saw the helicopters drawing the massive uprooted tree through the air and lost it. Who are these people? What kind of place is this? I have to get out of here.

The Dhaliwals didn’t necessarily help themselves by making a “pact of silence” in the ambulance, or hiring the attorney who defended wife-killer Scott Peterson. It also probably doesn’t help that they are young men of color with criminal records, and that the police allegedly found vodka and pot in the backseat of their bimmer. San Franciscans like this poster, identified as “eyeofthetiger,” have used the incident as an opportunity to vent class frustrations: “The [Dhaliwals] represent to me every loser thug I’ve seen on MUNI or screwing around in public, loud, obnoxious, dangerous. And the idea that they will somehow profit monetarily from this tragedy just makes me crazy.” More than a few speculated about how the Dhaliwals could possibly afford such a nice car, or such an expensive brand of vodka (Grey Goose). Though no one went so far as to say that the dead boy deserved what he got, the fury unleashed on the two who happened to live suggests that it’s only grudging respect for the fact that he bled to death on the sidewalk that’s keeping these bilious bloggers in check.

It’s hard not to wonder how different the public reaction would have been if the victims had been white kids from Mill Valley, just as likely, if not more, to get baked and go to the zoo. Would the police have treated the big cat exhibit as a crime scene? Would they have fought tirelessly for access to the brothers’ car and cell phones? Tatiana was well-known and loved in San Francisco—these boys represent (though who knows who they really are) a far more dangerous and out-of-control element. And by being attacked, they had the temerity to remind San Franciscans that Tatiana was a tiger, not the city’s own personal pet.

In Western literature, tigers embody pure, undiluted malice. Blake’s Tyger is a form of evil entirely outside divine creation: “When the stars threw down their spears/ And water’d heaven with their tears:/ Did he smile his work to see?/ Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Blake’s tiger is reincarnated in Kipling’s The Jungle Book as the vicious Sher Khan, the limping man-eater who will stop at nothing to be king of the jungle. Actually, I was treated recently to a musical adaptation of “The Tyger” at an outdoor festival on New Year’s Eve (you know, one of those “we can have good sober fun” affairs) The band was a neo-celtic outfit, dressed to the nines in tartans, lace-up leather boots and long cloaks. The bagpipe player had a knife belted to his side, which I thought was a little pretentious—was he planning to skin a deer in the middle of the set? But maybe I was being unjust; perhaps the knife was for self-defense. I certainly felt like murdering him after the show.

Why tigers are so vilified, as opposed to, say, lions, is hard to pin down…lions seem lazy, lying about in the sun all day. They attack from the open grasslands, while tigers sneak around in the thicket. Tigers have a reputation for being “man-eaters;” it’s believed they can “acquire” a taste for human flesh. And of course, the devilish markings in orange and black.

In a zoo, you can get astonishingly close to a tiger and, theoretically, nothing will happen to you. Look, here is wild, terrifying nature, and look, with our superior ingenuity we can utterly pacify and control it. Sousa and the Dhaliwal brothers spoiled it for everyone. To the extent that they “caused” the attack, they also plunged San Francisco into the uncanniness of imagining an escaped animal roaming at will through the city streets, a horrifically un-kosher mixing of civilization and sylvan chaos. What was thought tame was revealed to be wild still; what was beautiful became hideous; what was contained got loose. It’s much less disturbing to place all the blame on the Dhaliwals than it is to consider that the captive animals we admire, and perhaps imagine that we connect with, are just waiting to get out and murder us. No matter how many gorillas learn sign language, no matter how many chimps look up Jane Goodall’s shirt, animals don’t think human life is special or worth protecting. Most don’t even think it’s interesting.

There are details we can only imagine. How did the other animals react when Tatiana strode by their enclosures? Did the gibbons holler in terror? Did the incontinent lorikeets hurl themselves against the bars of their cage? And what was Tatiana thinking as she advanced towards the whirling red lights of the SFPD patrol cars? Was she preparing to take them all on?

Tatiana died well for a tiger. She didn’t see it coming, and probably didn’t feel much. She didn’t whither away in captivity, she wasn’t ground up into medicine, and she won’t adorn anyone’s wall. Carlos did not die well, and his family will have to live with it for the rest of their lives. Every time a stranger asks his mother how many children she has, she will mentally subtract one, for poor mangled Carlos.

Carlos and Tatiana; together, the names have a poetic quality, like Romeo and Juliet, as if they were ill-fated lovers who could only be united in death. Humankind’s relationship with tigers is Shakespearean in its tragic impossibility. Where one of us lives, the other can’t. We’re encroaching more and more on the few places where they still live in the wild, and this incident illustrates powerfully that we can’t bring them to live with us. The price of not keeping them locked up like criminals or banished like outcasts is human lives—mothers getting bizarre and unbearable phone calls. As the parties with the higher cognition, it’s our duty to figure this out; not to devise cleverer ways of keeping them contained or more efficient methods of destroying their habitats. In the meantime, I hold Carlos and Tatiana in my mind. I imagine them regarding each other from the opposite sides of a great wide field.