Dozens of animals abandoned by a traveling zoo in Russia -- including some endangered species -- have been rescued from dire conditions thanks to intervention by local journalists and citizens' pressure on public officials.
The animals require special care and still face a long road to recovery after having been transferred from cramped cages to a municipal zoo last month.
The wolves were in the worst shape. They had been fed only once or twice a week, and not at all what they should have been eating, Ivan Romanov, chief zookeeper at the Tanai Lake State Park, told AOL News. When we got the Ussurian tiger, it could hardly get up; now, it's much better, although still hardly in good health.
Only one of the bears rescued appears ready to go into late hibernation, Romanov said, adding, Without sufficient fat reserves, bears die in their sleep.
The prosecutor's office in the city of Kemerovo confirms that an investigation is under way, but it is unclear when or if charges will be brought because no one has been able to track down the people responsible for the abuse.
The animals' plight surfaced in early November after a journalism student brought photographs to the editorial offices of Tom, a weekly newspaper in Kemerovo, an industrial city in Siberia. They showed the animals in appalling conditions where they had been left, under a bridge near the city limits. The animals looked terrible, recalled Daria Semenova, a Tom reporter. We contacted the zoo workers and learned that they had nothing to feed the animals.
It turned out that there were only two zoo workers. Yevgenia Timchenko, a senior state inspector for the Animal Protection Department, told AOL News that the workers had been instructed to take care of the zoo, but were not provided with any documentation of the ownership of the beasts and lacked both the training and the wherewithal to care for the animals.
And the animals, about 40 of them, were in desperate need of care. The menagerie contained a Ussurian tiger, an endangered species of which fewer than 700 remain. Emaciated wolves struggled to keep from freezing. There were also trained performance goats, a Himalayan bear, a group of macaques and a white-tailed eagle, another endangered species.
Authorities said the zoo originated in much warmer climes in Armenia. The owners apparently spend the winters in Georgia, returning in the spring to travel with the animals that survived the winter. The authorities have been unable to locate them, and, according to a report in the newspaper Kuzbass, they have been identified only in theory, because no documents attesting to ownership have ever been presented to us.
Link: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/22/russian-activists-rescue-animals-from-abandoned-zoo/
The animals require special care and still face a long road to recovery after having been transferred from cramped cages to a municipal zoo last month.
The wolves were in the worst shape. They had been fed only once or twice a week, and not at all what they should have been eating, Ivan Romanov, chief zookeeper at the Tanai Lake State Park, told AOL News. When we got the Ussurian tiger, it could hardly get up; now, it's much better, although still hardly in good health.
Only one of the bears rescued appears ready to go into late hibernation, Romanov said, adding, Without sufficient fat reserves, bears die in their sleep.
The prosecutor's office in the city of Kemerovo confirms that an investigation is under way, but it is unclear when or if charges will be brought because no one has been able to track down the people responsible for the abuse.
The animals' plight surfaced in early November after a journalism student brought photographs to the editorial offices of Tom, a weekly newspaper in Kemerovo, an industrial city in Siberia. They showed the animals in appalling conditions where they had been left, under a bridge near the city limits. The animals looked terrible, recalled Daria Semenova, a Tom reporter. We contacted the zoo workers and learned that they had nothing to feed the animals.
It turned out that there were only two zoo workers. Yevgenia Timchenko, a senior state inspector for the Animal Protection Department, told AOL News that the workers had been instructed to take care of the zoo, but were not provided with any documentation of the ownership of the beasts and lacked both the training and the wherewithal to care for the animals.
And the animals, about 40 of them, were in desperate need of care. The menagerie contained a Ussurian tiger, an endangered species of which fewer than 700 remain. Emaciated wolves struggled to keep from freezing. There were also trained performance goats, a Himalayan bear, a group of macaques and a white-tailed eagle, another endangered species.
Authorities said the zoo originated in much warmer climes in Armenia. The owners apparently spend the winters in Georgia, returning in the spring to travel with the animals that survived the winter. The authorities have been unable to locate them, and, according to a report in the newspaper Kuzbass, they have been identified only in theory, because no documents attesting to ownership have ever been presented to us.
Link: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/22/russian-activists-rescue-animals-from-abandoned-zoo/
