A reportage from Michael Bachelard for Fairfax Media(Petitions link & infos below this page!) Melani the Sumatran tiger heaves herself pa...
A reportage from Michael Bachelard for Fairfax Media(Petitions link & infos below this page!) Melani the Sumatran tiger heaves herself painfully to her feet, walks to the fence and is hand-fed a few pieces of chicken cut into small chunks. She's skin and bone, but she eats less than a child might before returning to chew, like a sick domestic cat, on the grass.There are less than 400 of Melani's kind still roaming the dwindling forests of Sumatra, and soon this zoo-bound specimen will also be dead, after spending most of her life in squalor in Surabaya Zoo.She suffers from an unidentified wasting disease which means her food, even when it's minced, passes through her, almost entirely undigested.She's the latest casualty in a zoo that's become infamous for killing its occupants. International expert Ian Singleton believes it and almost all other zoos in Indonesia should be closed down ''or at very least forced to upgrade dramatically'' under strictly enforced deadlines. Last year the world was alerted to the problems at the zoo in Indonesia's second-largest city when a giraffe died and was found to have a 20-kilogram ball of plastic in its stomach. Last month, Rezak, another Sumatran tiger, died. He was old but also had lung disease contracted in a tiny, permanently damp, cage. The holding facilities were shocking, wet all the time,'' says Tony Sumampau, the head of the Indonesian Zoological Parks Association and now a consultant to the zoo. ''Most of the animals died because they got pneumonia, lung disease, TB, or from digestion problems because of the food supply.''These conditions, though, are a vast improvement on what the animals endured three years ago.There was an internal conflict among the management, and the staff were ... divided too,'' says curator Sri ''Penta'' Pentawati. ''They took sides and ... were more focused on the conflict than caring for the animals.''The result was horrific. The cages, some built in the 1920s, were tiny and fraying, the animals so in-bred that deer had antlers growing out the front of their heads. ▬►MORE INFOS & PETITIONS HERE ON MY PAGE @ FACEBOOK:▬▬▬▬►https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fb... Less
