[the_af]

> When I was a child, there used to be a black bear in the zoo, pacing back and forth in its cage all day long. Then came the accident involving a little girl named Yanzi (meaning ‘Swallow’). She had gotten too close to the railings. The bear licked her leg through the bars. A bear’s tongue is covered in backward-facing barbs. That lick tearing off a chunk of flesh and severing her tendons instantly.Yanzi ended up in a wheelchair, never able to stand again.

Bear tongues don't work like this. While they are rough, much like a cat's or a dog's, they don't have barbs large enough to "tear off a chunk of flesh" or "sever tendons".

If this anecdote is not an embellishment, it must have been the bear biting the girl's leg, which is not at all unheard of from bears in zoos (we had such a case in Argentina in '88, a bear tore off a boy's arm through the cage bars in "Cutini's Zoo". The zoo was shut down as a result. I don't know what happened to the bear, but maybe it was put down like in your story).