Bear eaten by cats in Karaganda

A horrendous incident occurred at the Karaganda Zoo: children witnessed a baby bear being eaten by jaguars, Tengrinews reports citing Novyi Vestnik. Their parents tried to stop the jaguars from attacking a bear cub by hitting the walls of the cage, but to no avail. There were no zoo workers nearby to save the little bear. A witness Victoria Kryukova said that animals were initially in separate cages. “There was a little door between the cages. Jaguars opened it and got into the bear cub’s cage. He hid under a bench and jaguars were trying to get it out for about 15 minutes. The little bear roared at them. They toyed with it. Then one of the jaguars cornered the little bear and the second jaguar dragged it out. The jaguar snapped its spine,” Ms. Kryukova said. Parents took their crying children away. The remaining witnesses watched jaguars eat the bear cub. The administration of the Zoo was not surprised at all. In fact, they had given the baby bear for jaguars to be eaten on purpose. Svetlana Pilyuk of the Zoo administration explained that the bear cub was born weak and sickly. It was not able to eat properly and suffered from a tumor. The jaguars were chosen as executors because they had previously eaten bear meat. For Ms. Pilyuk having children witness the slaughter was a horrendous act of lazy Zoo workers who did not want to stay after work to kill the baby bear. She called the workers “mediocre workers” who “cast a shadow” on the Zoo 's reputation. It did not occur to Ms. Pilyuk, as it did to many angry people, that slaughtering a sick animal is in itself a horrendous inhuman act. Alla Noerenchuk of the Kazakhstan Against Cruelty to Animals foundation argued that there is a need for a proper legislation that protects animals in Kazakhstan. “We have been offering ready drafts, but our government does not want to initiate the legislation. Cruelty to animals is gaining its momentum and we have been witnessing it escalate for several years already. (…) What we witnessed in the Karaganda Zoo is one of thousands of acts of cruelty towards animals,” she added. The draft legal act that advocates against cruelty to animals requires that in case an animal is sick, it has to be euthanized. But the administration of the Karaganda Zoo did not consider such method and just gave the baby bear to the jaguars as a meal. “The Criminal Code has an article about cruelty to animals, but it is not used at all because the article talks about cases where animals were slaughtered with cruelty with hooligan motives. But there is no hooligan motive here,” Ms. Noerenchuk said. The Criminal Code condemns such criminals to 2 years of imprisonment. A Kazakhstan lawyer Dzhokhar Utebekov considered the incident in the Karaganda Zoo to be lacking any signs of cruel handling of the animals. “The article in the Criminal Code is absolutely dead. It is either that no one is convicted under this article or that people are so indifferent that they do not report such cases to the police,” Mr. Utebekov said. The workers of the Almaty Zoo strongly disagree with their collegues in Karaganda. “I think it is not right and definitely inhuman. It is horrible when rabbits are given to predators because in natural environment animals have a chance to escape. There have been no such incidents in the Almaty Zoo. We purchase meat to feed our animals. In other cases we stun rabbits and mice before giving them to predators (…). Many zoos around the world give ready meat to predators. Otherwise it is a pure abuse,” the Director of the Almaty Zoo Agibay Azhibayev said. For many the sickly condition of the baby bear does not justify the cruelty and indifference of the Zoo workers. “If you think about the indifference of the Zoo workers and the agony of the last moments of the helpless bear cub that was trying to get away from the predators, a question arises: are we, humans, really the supreme creatures, “garlands of evolution” as we like to think of ourselves?” Maria Baideldinova asks in her letter to the law enforcement. By Gyuzel Kamalova