With all the recent media attention focussed on euthanasia, or medically assisted suicide, what’s just hogged the headlines has been suicide of a more unusual kind. If you’ve been following the news, you’d know that a Malaysian contract worker was killed on Nov 14 after invading the territory of the ‘big white cats’ at the Singapore Zoological Gardens.

The late Nordin Bin Montong, 32, reportedly jumped into the moat at the animals’ enclosure where he was attacked by the 3 tigers. Zookeepers desperately tried to save him but to no avail.

According to The Straits Times, a pair of Australian tourists had noticed Nordin behaving strangely before the incident. Armed with a broom and a yellow pail, he entered the enclosure by crossing over the low vault. To read more about this incident, visit here.

Why is it that everyone is trying new and unconventional ways to die? Is it the publicity or just a way to have someone to settle your cremation? But why risk the destruction of your body when you die? Why traumatise the innocent bystanders who just happen to be there at the site of where you chose to die?

Remember when 2 men jumped off the tracks at the Admiralty and Yishun MRT station? What surprised me was how did the videos of the accident start circulating on the Internet? If I’d been there, just witnessing such a horrible thing once would have turned my stomach.

For a long time, I was shaken by the fact that I’d seen the corpse of a woman who had jumped off the building where I live. Though I didn’t see the jump, the sight of the lifeless body already traumatised me. Imagine if I had witnessed the jump at the MRT station or the man being mauled by the white cats!

Google “suicide trends” in Singapore, and the top results show the videos of both separate MRT suicide incidents. Honestly speaking, I couldn’t help but to click on it and watched the videos. My jaws literally dropped when one of the videos showed how the man simply jumped off the platform.

There are people who question the authenticity of the videos but the issue here is not the suicide itself but the numbers of young adults committing suicide. A local study done in 2006 showed that suicide was one of the 3 most common reasons for death among those aged between 15 and 35, with youths most commonly ending their lives because of relationship woes or academic stress.

The eternal optimist may say that this is better than young people grabbing guns and leaving a trail of dead schoolmates first before killing themselves, as was the infamous case in Virginia Tech last year. But every life lost is one too many.

With so many things to shorten our lives- terminal illnesses that seem to strike with increasing frequency, tainted food products that kill silently, accidents and natural disasters that wipe out whole communities, it’s tragic that we’re probably the only species on earth that ends our own lives prematurely and voluntarily. If only they took heed of the words in Mitch Albom’s novel Tuesdays with Morrie – “Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”