ABOVE: Crews use a weed whacker, a tarp, and more to try to coax a tiger back into it’s cage at an abandoned Detroit auto plant.
TORONTO – A tiger on the loose in Detroit – the baseball jokes almost write themselves.
But a tarp, a weed whacker, and other garden tools were used to try and corral a tiger inside an abandoned Detroit auto plant Monday in a bizarre and potentially dangerous scene caught on video.
Detroit police were dispatched to the site of the Packard Automotive Plant, one of Detroit’s most famous abandoned buildings, at 11:47 Monday morning after calls that there was an animal on the loose.
According to police, these calls came after several videos were posted to social media showing crews attempting to corral a tiger on the loose on the factory grounds.
In one of their attempts, the crew used a tarp to try to scare the big cat out of a fourth story stairwell where it was apparently holed up. When that doesn’t work, a man tried to coax it out with a weed whacker.
The posts quickly created a storm on social media.
Turns out the tiger was part of a photoshoot with British photographer David Yarrow, according to the Detroit Free Press, when the tiger got loose and couldn’t be cajoled back into its cage.
And the men trying to herd the big cat? They’re just friends of the photographer who responded to what was certainly a bizarre call.
“I got a call from a friend who asked me to help them get this tiger out of a staircase,” Detroit resident Andy Didorosi told The Detroit Free Press.
“He asked me if I had a leafblower, and I said I had a weedwhacker, so he told me to bring that. I stopped what I was doing, grabbed my tools and hopped in my truck, because, you know…tiger.”
Eventually, trainers were able to get the cat back into its cage, but not before outraging the project manager at Packard Automotive.
“We arranged for a photography group of humans to be on site for two days. We never approved any animals being on the site, and we had the matter taken care of in the first hour,” Kari Smith told the Detroit Free Press. “We do not condone animals being on the site here, and the shoot was canceled. This is nothing we signed on for.”
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