INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
There were more incidents of stoning at the Fuzhou Zoo after the kangaroo's death (AFP)
A kangaroo was stoned to death in a Chinese zoo - apparently for the same
reason that a brown bear was once crushed to death by Russian videographers, and a shark in Florida was dragged behind a motorboat like a
kite.That is, to gratify a human.The kangaroo - a 12-year-old female whose name is not known - was not hopping enough to amuse spectators at
the Fuzhou Zoo in February, The New York Times reported, quoting Chinese media.So someone picked up a rock
Or it might have been a brick or slab of concrete, Agence France-Presse wrote
In any case, it wasn't unusual for visitors to this zoo in southeast China to provoke the animals with projectiles."Some adults see the
kangaroos sleeping and then pick up rocks to throw at them," a zookeeper told the Haixia Metropolis News, as reported by the Times
Employees tried to dissuade the crowd, the worker said, but "after we cleared the display area of rocks, they went to find them
elsewhere."By the time zookeepers rescued the kangaroo from the crowd, AFP reported, her foot was nearly severed.Details of the attack were
first made public this week, when Chinese television stations broadcast images of the kangaroo lying battered in its enclosure, and then
hooked to an intravenous drip, on which she survived for several days before succumbing to internal bleeding.One of the stones had ruptured
the animal's kidney, veterinarians discovered after the autopsy, the Australian Broadcasting Corp
wrote.Had the attacks ended then, they might be no more sadistic than any other to occur at a Chinese zoo, which AFP reports are lightly
regulated and therefore especially prone to abuse
Last summer, for example, investors involved in a dispute with a zoo in Jiangsu province released a donkey into the tiger pen, with
predictable results.But the Fuzhou stonings didn't end with that death
Just a few weeks later, the agency wrote, visitors attacked and injured a five-year-old kangaroo for similar reasons
It survived.In nearly every media interview, zoo workers stressed that it's against the rules to bludgeon the animal, but people keep doing
Having apparently given up on the prospect of voluntary civility, AFP wrote, the zoo now plans to install more security cameras.The zoo also
plans to stuff and display the dead kangaroo - as a sort of memorial to whatever it might now symbolize.(Except for the headline, this story
has not been edited by staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
