Just remember that wild animals are just that - wild

Friends of Dawn Brancheau, an animal trainer who was killed at Sea World Orlando this week, said she would have not wanted anything to happen to the killer whale that dragged her to her death.

But something already had happened to the six-ton animal. It had been kept in a small tank rather than the open ocean, its range limited to part of an amusement park rather than the thousands of miles that it would cover in the wild.

When a 400-pound tiger attacked and nearly killed trainer Roy Horn on a Las Vegas stage in 2003, when a chimpanzee maimed a woman in Connecticut last year, attention turned to what might have provoked the animals after years in which they had not exhibited aggression.

The question should be what makes people think that the animals will never attack someone? They are wild animals, evolved to survive in the jungle rather than a Connecticut bedroom or a Las Vegas stage, or in an ocean than a swimming pool.

At some Sea World locations, children sometimes are called from the audience to feed fish to killer whales. There is little chance that captive killer whales and other wild animals no longer will be put on display for profit, but at the very least such exhibits should be regulated so that unwitting human prey may appreciate the animals from afar.