Xinhua News Agency: Tigers on loose in Mount Tai tourist site

[Guest guest]

Xinhua News Agency 2005-06-13 19:13:10

 

Tigers on loose in Mount Tai tourist site

 

JINAN, June 13 (Xinhuanet) -- Three tigers were confirmed to have

sneaked into the famous tourist site Mount Tai in east China,

prompting local government to rope off two tourist attractions and

send hundreds of armed police for the hunt.

 

Officials with the administration of Mount Tai tourist site on

Monday said one adult tiger and two baby tigers were looming in the

mountainous Dong Lu area and around Tianzhu peak. They had

temporarily shut down the two sites and plastered alert notice on

walls of the villages around the sites, where more than one thousand

people resided.

 

Officials on Mount Tai declined to give more details about the tiger

or the search. But source close to the administration said light

sniper-armed police and paramilitary have been sent to the mountains.

 

Source said two wildlife experts from the Jinan safari zoo came to

Mount Tai on Sunday afternoon with their special anesthetic rifles.

 

No one was sure where the tigers came from. Some villagers said the

predators might have escaped from a tiger zoo near Mount Tai, while

others said they might have come all the way from Jinan safari zoo.

 

But the source said the tigers must be extremely hungry as there were

rarely any wildlife animals on the Mount Tai. They might attack any

human being at the site.

 

Despite closed-down of the two tourist sites, Mount Tai administration

staff did not shut down the major tourist attraction nearly 8 or 9 km

away from the shut-down areas. No alert notice was found here.

 

Streams of travelers still go sightseeing up and down the major

tourist site. Many of them heard about the tiger hunt but few of them

seemed to let it disturb their sightseeing.

 

---

--

--