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+--- Thread: Ohio man must spend two days in jail for petting zoo cougars (/showthread.php?tid=498)
Ohio man must spend two days in jail for petting zoo cougars - IceWizard - 07-30-2015
Wed Jul 29, 2015 1:19pm EDT
By Kim Palmer
CLEVELAND (Reuters) -
An Ohio man who posted a video of himself petting cougars at a Columbus zoo appealed no contest to a trespassing charge on Wednesday and has to spend two days in jail and pay more than $200 in fines, court documents said.
Joshua Newell, 35, jumped an outer fence to
gain access to another fenced-in enclosure and called the cougars to him in order to pet them, the documents said. Newell then posted a nearly two-minute video of the encounter on YouTube where he enticed the animals by calling "Here, kitty, kitty" and "That's a good kitty."
Newell was charged last week with criminal
trespassing, a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to four days in jail, with two days suspended.
A representative for the Columbus Zoo and
Aquarium was not immediately available for
comment.
This is the second time this year that a zoo
patron in the state was charged with
trespassing.
In June, Michelle Schwab was sentenced to a year of probation for a similar charge after dropping her two-year-old son into a cheetah exhibit at the Cleveland zoo in April.
(Reporting by Kim Palmer in Cleveland; Editing
by Mary Wisniewski and Andrew Hay)
**Opinion**
This is a prime example of I consider to be a complete and utter idiot! What part of "wild animal" do they fail to understand! Hey an ordinary house cat can make you real miserable in a flash, with this in mind add a few hundred pounds and "voila" you have youself a real serious problem.... Possibly even death! I just don't know the thinking (if there even was any) behind something as stupid as this.