From Richard Reynolds #2

!cid_X_MA1_1294610916@aol, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. Richard Reynolds says - - - This is a Komodo Dragon in the Frankfurt Zoo,Germany around 1962. This female was quite tractable. But that is not always the case as the actress Sharon Stone and her husband found out. The following is the story of an incident in the Los Angles zoo on June 9, 2001, and was told by Manuel Mollinedo, new director of Honolulu zoo but with the LA zoo when the incident occurred. Said Mollinedo - - We have many stars visit the Los Angeles Zoo; we take them for tours. This one time, we had Phil Bronstein and his wife, Sharon Stone, come and visit the zoo. ... Phil Bronstein really fancied himself as quite a reptile expert, and he wanted to take a picture with the Komodo monitor. If you ever knew anything about his history, he's kind of a cowboy, or used to be when he was reporting. And Sharon Stone convinced my general curator to let Phil Bronstein go into the back of that exhibit so that she could take a picture of him next to the Komodo, in total violation of our protocols. And, you know, she's a very beautiful woman and this guy's, you know, a male; she talked him into it. So they go in there, and (Bronstein's) got white tennis shoes on, and the Komodo bites his tennis shoe. So he kind of laughs it off, and so he comes back outside the exhibit. The reptile keeper looks at the shoe and says, "Oh, the reason is the Komodo eats white mice; we feed the Komodo white mice and so he thought your shoe was a white mouse." So Sharon Stone tells him, "Oh, honey, why don't you take your shoes off and go in there?" So you've got this haole from the mainland that lives in San Francisco who has this pasty white foot -- this is just some of my editorializing now -- he goes back into the exhibit barefoot; I mean, they should have at least put some rain boots on him. He goes back into the exhibit to get his picture taken, Sharon's in there trying to take this picture. The Komodo turns around, grabs him by the foot. And he's trying to scramble, because, you know, it's very painful. ... My keeper, who's in there with him, is really panicked because he's worried that the Komodo's going to get hurt because they're endangered, and so my keeper finally reaches over and undoes his jaws. Phil Bronstein did not lose his toe, as was mentioned in the paper, but he was bit by the Komodo. And so he's bleeding all over the place; he has to go to the hospital. They had to bring in a specialist because it severed a portion of the tendon, it didn't sever the whole tendon. They sewed the tendon back. I mean, I saw him in San Francisco, and he was walking fine.The thing that we're really concerned about is that Komodos are not venomous but they carry a lot of very virulent bacteria in their mouths, and we were worried that it was going to be infected. So Bronstien goes to Cedars-Sinai; we do saliva analysis ... We discovered that a Komodo in captivity has fewer virulent bacteria than a Komodo in the wild, because the diet is much better. Turns out the bacteria was very responsive to antibiotics; he recovered