Deprived of visitors and income due to confinement, zoos struggle to feed their animals. From this situation, a German park plans to kill some of its animals to feed others.
From a sick economy comes real despair. The zoo in Neumünster, in the north of Germany, is hit hard by the confinement and the coronavirus crisis. In the newspaper Die Welt, the zoo director, Verena Kaspari, explains that the establishment risks losing around 175,000 euros in revenue and consider an extreme solution:
"JI would rather euthanize certain animals than let them starve. In the worst case, we will have to kill animals to feed others. we made a list of those we should kill first", she says.
An unthinkable prospect for the zoo director: "Killing certain animals so that others can live would be only a last resort and it would be unpleasant, but even that would not solve the financial problem".
A call for donations
At the end of March, the zoo association in Germany had asked for 100 million euros in aid from Angela Merkel to help establishments closed to visitors due to the confinement linked to the coronavirus crisis. The director's call for help aroused anger and emotion in Germany. The national association of zoos, which takes care of the Neumünster zoo, expressed its total disagreement with this plan of crisis while calling for the help of the government. The latter recalls that during the closure, the animals always need to be fed and that some always require special living conditions, a tropical temperature for example. Some zoo keepers across Europe have also pointed out the harmful effect of the loneliness some animals usually suffer from.
A call for donations was launched Wednesday on the Go Fund Me site to save these animals.
On the French side, the economic repercussions of the pandemic are also being felt. The Beauval ZooParc, for example, lost between 12 and 14 million euros for the month of April, while the La Flèche zoo suffered an estimated loss of 6 million euros. The Vincennes zoo, for its part, was able to benefit from the solidarity of a large restaurant chain, which donated several tonnes of meat to feed its animals.
Singular events at animal level
Some animals from various zoos around the world do not seem to be disturbed by the containment yet. They even get used to it quite well, and take advantage of the drop in attendance to indulge in new practices. Two pandas from the Ocean Park zoo in Hong Kong took advantage of the confinement to mate, much to the delight of the park staff. And for good reason, it has been ten years that the zoo has been trying somehow to push them to reproduce.
One of the penguins at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago took advantage of the closure of the establishment to take a tour of the owner. In a video that has gone viral, we see this Wellington penguin visiting other animals, but this time, he is on the other side of the glass.
Faced with these little moments of joy, it should also be remembered that the spread of Covid-19 is far from good news for certain animals present in animal parks. While a New York Zoo tiger has recently tested positive for the virus, scientists are concerned that some primates, including great apes, may also be contaminated. The latter are indeed sensitive to viruses transmitted by humans, including influenza, gastroenteritis and chickenpox.