Photo shoot for Toronto Star–owned magazine results in lion attack, bloody lung

It’s Easter for many of us, and let’s face it: we’re looking for a laugh. In that spirit, I offer the latest in unconscious self-parody from those laughmeisters at the Toronto Star (motto: All the news that’s unintentionally hilarious). Yesterday, in seeking to promote its latest throwaway publication, Desi Life (“the Star’s award-winning bimonthly magazine about the GTA’s South Asian community”), the Star ran a news item accompanied by an ad for the new issue that tells the heartwarming tale of the mag’s latest cover shoot. Apparently—or perhaps, evidently—the photo session was interrupted when a 180-kilogram (397 pounds) lion mauled the subject (one Gitanjali Kolanad, martial arts instructor), breaking four of her ribs, bruising her lung and putting her out of work for a month.

Thestar.com posted a video that shows the entire sequence of the attack and is essentially a primer on liability. The animal trainers haven’t got a clue, and neither does the photographer. After the attack, rather than remove the beast, they allow it to take another run at her—which they included in the video! The whole thing is narrated by the victim in a tone somewhere between chilled shock and abject mortification.

The Star, displaying typical legerdemain, reports that, “It was not an attack, the witnesses said. The lion’s mouth was not open and Kolanad was not scratched. The Bowmanville Zoo had no comment on the incident.”

I bet.

Won’t somebody please take this woman’s case on a contingency basis and sue the newspaper for, say, $100,000,000 for utter negligence? I’m sure Star subscribers would pitch in as a class action.

• Lion shakes up magazine shoot [Toronto Star]