We do not want our Guests to be afraid
Shannon Sullivan was surprised, then angry.
Not two months after 2-year-old Lane Graves was dragged into a lake by an alligator at a Disney resort and killed, she found herself face-to-face with a sign that made her deeply uncomfortable.
The Disney College Program bills itself as a “life-changing,” “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. Sullivan knew that she might lose her summer internship if she spoke out about this sign, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. She was willing to risk her spot in the program, one she quickly lost after she posted a photo of the sign to Twitter.
What did the sign say? “Alligators are friendly and cuddly, jump in the water and play with them!”? Not quite, but too close.
The sign read, in full:
If a Guest asks if we have gators in the water around Tom Sawyer’s Island (or any bodies of water), the correct and appropriate response is, “Not that we know of, but if we see one, we will call Pest Management to have it removed.” Please do not say we have seen them before. We do not want our Guests to be afraid while walking around Frontierland [part of Disney’s Magic Kingdom]. As a reminder, this is a serious matter. Please do not make jokes with our guests about this.
After the toddler was killed by the alligator. That’s the “correct” response how, exactly?
So Sullivan took a picture of the sign and posted it on Twitter, knowing it would probably get her fired. It did.
Her tryst with unemployment didn’t last long, though. That night, the Orlando Sentinel reached out to Disney with questions about the termination. The next morning, Magic Kingdom Vice President Dan Cockerell visited Sullivan himself to offer her internship back, which she accepted.
Disney removed the offending sign, claiming it was never authorized, the Associated Press reported.
The managers put up a lot of signs for day to day operational stuff, which don’t need approval from upper levels, and they considered this one such sign. I hope the upper levels at Disney have instructed managers to take safety more seriously than that now.
I have some experience of this, actually. I once worked at a zoo, which means I worked at a place where people could, if they tried hard enough, put themselves in danger from animals. Mostly that didn’t happen, but the potential was there.
At the time of Graves’s death, there were no signs warning visitors of dangerous animals. Three days after Graves’s death, the Walt Disney World Resort installed signs along the beachfront of its resorts that warn guests of alligators and snakes.
So Sullivan was right – and she got her job back.
Boy Scouts of America please note.
Of course, Disney regularly makes movies where wild animals are shown as cuddly, boys can be raised by wolves, and bears dance and sing.
It would be nice to prevent more deaths of both toddlers and alligators; humans and wildlife don’t usually mix very well, and it’s better to make your guests feel comfortable by alerting them where the danger lies so they can take proper precautions, not by ignoring the issue.
Alligators gotta be alligators. We should be wary when dealing with them.
True. I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose I’d sort of hate to see that entire genre go away, because stories of animal-human friendship seem like a core myth that we need.
There are many signs in Northern Australia warning of the dangers of salt-water crocodiles, they are huge animals and far more dangerous than alligators, adult humans are easy meals.Tourists occasionally ignore the warnings, because they’re drunk, extremely unlucky or just plain stupid, sometimes they pay the price. Of course there’s a reaction and moronic news stories about ‘rogue’ crocodiles, all crocs are rogues.
I was amazed when I first read that report that there were no warning signs. It is obvious that children would be vulnerable to alligator attacks. Someone should spend some time in jail.
Crocs are crocs, doing what they do. They have no malicious intent when they lunch on a human, it’s just lunch. A nice large lunch, which doesn’t always come along so handily for a wild animal.
Humans often don’t act very smart around wild animals. Then they blame the animal for doing what they normally do, and not the human for acting carelessly.
We have a tendency to attribute intent to storms, too. Crocs are not evil, they are just crocs. Hurricanes are not evil, they are just large twirling masses of wind and water, and when we get in their way, it is hardly their intent to do harm to us. They just twirl, because that’s what they do.
iknklast @4
“Crocs are crocs, doing what they do.” “Crocs are not evil, they are just crocs” Of course, those are exactly the points I was making when I wrote “all crocs are rogues”.
Recently a woman was killed by a saltie in Northern Australia, she was reported to be last seen alive ‘waist deep in the water”. Jeez! Rangers tracked and shot the offending reptile, as if that would make any difference to the general threat to humans, basically it’s just PR. There are thousands of the Jurassic monsters in the area. A few weeks before that incident, a fisherman was drowned in a croc attack, the animal overturned the boat he was in. He and his companion had been warned that their boat was too small to be safe from crocodile attack, but they went fishing anyway. I’m sure that ‘rogue crocodile” was tracked and killed.
So, the solution is either a massive cull,l as some Northern rednecks would like, or for humans to keep out of harm’s way.
People are crazy around wild animals. Kam Shan country park in Hong Kong is home to thousands of macaques. There are big signs in both Chinese and English telling you it is illegal to feed them but people still do in spite of the possiblity of paying a heavy fine. There is actually a plenty of food for them growing in the park but why bother to climb a banana tree when you can just sit next to a car park and have food thrown to you?
There are two major problems. The first is that people give them food that is totally unsuitable like crisps or salted peanuts. The second is that the macaques learn the food comes in bags and is stored in cars. Some of them become quite aggressive and trying to snatch people’s bags and others get into cars through open windows looking for food. It gets even worse in spring when there are lots of cute little babies around and people think the mothers need extra food, but actually they would be far better off if they were left to fend for themselves.
Oh, visitors throwing food at the zoo animals is the worst.
Another fatal mistake tourists sometimes make is to assume that wild animals which aren’t predators are somehow safe, hippos are vegetarian and extremely dangerous, So are the cassowaries which inhabit the tropical rainforests of NE Australia, sooner or later, a tourist who can’t believe that birds are dangerous, will be disembowelled.
Hippos are by a wide margin the most lethal animals in…I’m not sure if it’s Africa or the entire world. People don’t see them when only their eyes & nostrils are above water – they’re very fast – and they’re extremely aggressive.