Model Bitten By Lion

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31031, 11 April 1966, Page 9

Model Bitten By Lion

C.N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) NEW YORK, April 10.

Summonses were issued yesterday against three men charged with the responsibility for failing to protect a pretty model from a lion, who bit her during a publicity stunt.

Miss Nell Theobold, aged 21, was bitten on her left leg and thigh by Larry, a 2501 b lion with whom she was posing at a press preview of the International Automobile Show at the Coliseum. She underwent surgery and was reported to be in a satisfactory condition. But Roosevelt Hospital physicians said she would have to have several more plastic surgical operations over a long period of time to erase the scars left by the lion. The summonses were issued

against the lion’s ownertrainer, David Sabo, of New York, Leonard Brooks, of the Dawn Animal Agency, Inc., and William C. North, jun., of the Gray Advertising Agency, to appear in the Criminal Court on April 18. North had hired the lion and renamed it Ludwig for the staging of a “ribbon biting” ceremony to open the Bavarian Auto Works exhibition. The lion is the symbol of Bavaria.

The lion, which was tranquilised, had posed docilely with Miss Theobold and had been returned to its cage at the urging of a director of the Humane Society. But a late-arriving television crew begged for another run-through of the stunt, and Ludwig was let out of his cage again.

The crew bore down on the beast with blazing lights, apparently frightening him. He whirled on Miss Theobold, the nearest object to him, and snapped his fangs into’ her leg so hard that it

took two trainers with .chains to subdue him.

City law forbids keeping any “animal of a species which is wild, ferocious, fierce, dangerous” in any place which does not have “protective devices which are adequate to prevent such animals from injuring the public.”