Siberian Tiger Pounces On Zookeeper In Russia, Gnawing At Her Like Meat

A Russian zookeeper had a miraculous escape Saturday after she was pinned down by a Siberian tiger, which kept biting and clawing at her, while she was bringing food to its cage.

Typhoon, the 16-year-old tiger, sprang on its handler at Kaliningrad Zoo when the latter was bringing it its food, climbing onto the helpless woman, to the horror of the onlookers who witnessed the attack that reportedly went on for ten minutes.

According to the New York Post, the beast was supposed to have been confined inside another part of the compound, when the zookeeper brought its dinner to the animal's cage.

However, no one was manning its cage at the time, and as a result it managed to enter the area where the zookeeper was to bring the food.

“We heard screams, and the cries went on for a long time, for ten minutes or so,” one witness recalled, the Sun reported. “Then they subsided, before starting again. I couldn't show this to my child."

“My daughter and I went to the zoo and immediately to the cage where the tiger lives, but the sight was terrible,” another visitor stated. “There were shouts, everyone tried to chase away the tiger. When we got there, the woman was already bitten, (and) all covered in blood. The tiger didn't move away. It was biting, even a feeling that it gnawed like meat. People threw stones at him, all they could."

Since the incident took place inches away from the fence that separated the onlookers, many witnesses were close enough to take pictures of the attack.

The harrowing photos of the scene showed an unidentified uniformed woman lying on her back, screaming in pain, with the beast on top, just inches away from her face.

However, onlookers did not only stick to clicking pictures of the horrifying attack, they also picked up stones and started throwing them at the beast to distract it from its prey. When that did not do the trick, some men lifted a table and chairs from a nearby café and hurled them over the fence at the animal. This finally made the tiger lose its focus and as a result the victim was able to crawl to safety.

The female zookeeper was immediately taken to the intensive care at a hospital in Kaliningrad.

"The patient was delivered to the hospital with multiple wounds to the body and limbs,” A local health ministry spokesman said. “She is conscious – her condition is assessed as stable but critical. There is no threat to her life.”

After the zoo staff arrived at the scene, the aggressive tiger was sedated and taken back to its cage.

It was later revealed by a source that even though it showed a “bad temper” on the day, Typhoon did not have a record of being violent toward humans in the past. The Tiger was born on July 1, 2001 in Chelyabinsk Zoo but was later moved to Kaliningrad Zoo.