Zoo Animals In Danger of Being Slaughtered If Coronavirus Continues
Amid financial strain, one zoo in Germany has even said they’ve already listed the animals they’ll slaughter first.
Zoo animals face being “culled” as zoos continue to face financial difficulties due to the coronavirus pandemic.
With the global pandemic reducing or completely stopping ticket sales, zoos around the world are implementing measures to try and keep animals fed and alive.
One zoo in Germany explained the potentially devastating outcome for their captive animals. Speaking to the press about what will happen if their financial situation doesn’t improve, Verena Kaspar from Neumunster Zoo said
“we’ve listed the animals we’ll have to slaughter first.” As a last resort, she added, “if it comes to it, I’ll have to euthanise animals rather than let them starve. At the worst, we would have to feed some of the animals to others.”
Wildlife experts have condemned businesses, such as zoos, that choose to keep animals in captivity for human entertainment. “This current crisis is bringing the reason why we should not be keeping wild animals captive into stark realisation”, Sam Threadgill, head of the Freedom for Animals charity, told Metro.co.uk.
“As we know, that zoos are not strangers to culling their healthy animals in times of plenty, it is deeply worrying that this crisis may well lead to further deaths as zoos financially struggle in this crisis.”
Mr Threadgill goes on to explain that zoos have “brought this dire situation upon their animals, by keeping these animals entirely unnecessarily. European zoos cull an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 animals per year simply for being ‘surplus’ or having the wrong genes for breeding. As well as this the zoo environment can never fulfill all the needs of these wild animals, and this crisis brings further concerns for the suffering that captive animals are forced to endure.”
With many of us at home on lockdown, comments on social media have been drawing comparisons between our own isolation with the lives of captive zoo animals.
"If you are home on lockdown, perhaps you can feel a little of what the animals in captivity go through every day, their entire lives stopped from them," F1 champion Lewis Hamilton recently wrote to his 14.9 million Instagram followers.
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