How far some Chinese tourists go to avoid zoo entrance charges

(SCMP) 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. A number of zoos around the country have been grappling with the problem of people dicing with death to avoid the cost of a ticket. Earlier this year staff at Qinling Wildlife Park in Xian, Shaanxi province, discovered that people were saving almost half of the 100 yuan entrance fee by paying local residents 60 yuan for a ladder to climb over a wall close to a lion enclosure. In January, a man was mauled to death by a tiger after he climbed two three-metre walls into the Ningbo Youngor Zoo in Zhejiang province, in an attempt to avoid paying the 130 yuan entrance fee, local media reports said. Four men had tried sneaking into the same zoo in 2006 by climbing into the lion enclosure, and staff had to distract the animals with food so the men could escape. And it's not just entry fees that some visitors ignore. Last month a man had his right index finger bitten off by a bear in a zoo in the eastern city of Qingdao when he attempted to feed the animal, ignoring the many large "No Feeding" signs nearby. Source: South China Morning Post by Kristin Huang from China Travel & Tourism News http://ift.tt/1iB6EFm