On August 11, 2022, a woman in Phoenix was mauled by a jaguar after crossing a waist-high barrier to take a selfie. She survived, though with deep gashes down her arm and a torrent of online ridicule. “Darwin Award nominee,” people called her. “Stupid,” “selfish,” “influencer trash.” But a week later, she gave an interview. “I love big cats,” she said. “I just wanted to feel close to it.”
It was easy to write her off. But the truth is she’s not unique. The history of zoo trespassers—what officials call “unauthorized entry”—goes back nearly as far as zoos themselves. These stories are at once tragic, baffling, and oddly familiar. Because what drives a person to leap into a lion’s den or a bear pit isn’t always madness. Sometimes, it’s something else—something more human than we want to admit.
In the early hours of April 3, 1993, a man named Edward Shank was found inside the chimpanzee enclosure at the Milwaukee County Zoo. He’d scaled three fences and crossed a dry moat to get there. By the time security arrived, he was unconscious, bleeding, a chunk of his calf missing. The chimps were calm. Shank lived, barely.
He’d brought a bouquet of plastic flowers.
They were still clutched in one hand when the EMTs arrived.
A decade later, Shank gave a brief interview to the Milwaukee Journal. He said, “I thought they would know I meant no harm. That they’d recognize something in me.”
The paper didn’t print the quote.
We don’t know what we’re supposed to do with stories like these. They unsettle the neat lines we draw between ourselves and the animal world. They make us uncomfortable in our certainty that cages are always for safety, that only the unhinged would ever wish to cross over.
On March 14, 2001, three teenagers snuck into the San Diego Zoo after hours. Surveillance footage showed them scaling a retaining wall and disappearing into the shadows near the big cat exhibits. One of them, a 16-year-old named Oscar Ramos, made it into the tiger habitat. The others stayed behind.
Oscar never came out.
He was found by morning staff, half-covered in leaves, as though the tiger had been attempting to bury him. His autopsy indicated he may have survived the initial mauling, but died hours later from blood loss.
Zoo officials stated plainly that the fence had been scaled, the barriers ignored. There was nothing wrong with the containment. The fault, they said, was human.
And maybe they were right.
But Oscar’s mother insisted he’d always loved animals. She said he used to draw them obsessively, especially tigers. “He called them his brothers,” she said. “He thought they were like angels.”
We call these people reckless, disturbed, suicidal. And sometimes, they are. But sometimes they are just pulled by something deeper. Some longing not to be consumed, but to connect.
On December 3, 2018, a man named Miles Evers walked into the grizzly bear exhibit at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. He didn’t run, didn’t shout. He simply stepped over a low fence and approached one of the bears. Witnesses say he was crying.
The bear—a female named Dory—sniffed him, then swatted him once, hard, across the chest. He dropped to the ground, not moving. When staff lured Dory away with food, Miles stood up. He wasn’t dead.
When questioned, he said he had no intention of dying. “I wanted to look her in the eye,” he told police. “I wanted to know if she saw me.”
Sometimes the people who jump into cages are deeply lost. Sometimes they’re seeking something sacred. Sometimes they’re children—like the boy in Cincinnati who fell into the gorilla enclosure and became a national flashpoint. And sometimes they’re adults whose desire to touch something wild eclipses every instinct for safety.
We don’t really know why people cross those boundaries. We tell ourselves we’d never do it. But the truth is that many of us have stood at the fence and felt the pull. The low hum of awe. The primitive hum that says closer.
Maybe it’s not about death. Maybe it’s about dissolution—the collapse of the barrier between self and other, between human and beast.
In 2017, a 23-year-old named Diana Beck left a note before climbing into a crocodile enclosure in Australia. The note said, simply: “I want to stop being afraid.”
She survived. The crocs, by some miracle, didn’t react. She sat beside them for ten minutes before being dragged out by staff.
A psychologist later said she had “dissociative tendencies.”
But I think about her sometimes. I think about what it means to sit with the monster and ask nothing but presence.
Not everyone who jumps into a cage is crazy. Not all are trying to die. Some are just trying, in the most literal way possible, to get closer to something they feel they’ve lost—wildness, maybe. Or grace. Or the simple, irrational belief that the animal will see you, truly see you, and not strike.
If you’ve ever stood at the edge of a rooftop and felt the echo of your own breathlessness—not a desire to fall, but the faintest itch of what if—then maybe you understand this. If you’ve ever touched the glass between you and a pacing lion and whispered something without knowing why—maybe you know this too.
It’s easy to point and laugh and blame. It’s harder to admit that we all, at times, want to cross the boundary.
And it’s even harder to admit that some part of us believes, just maybe, we’d be welcomed on the other side.Camden Rusk is a nonfiction writer, amateur naturalist, and former zookeeper based in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Fieldline, Wilder Voice, and The High Country Reader. His upcoming essay collection, The Fence and the Feeling, explores the blurry boundaries between the human and the animal.
