Pakistan is close to shutting down a famous zoo in the port city of Karachi due to its lack of capacity to take care of the wild animals kept there. The development came after a 17-year-old elephant named Noor Jehan became severely sick due to inadequate care and treatment by the zoo authorities.
Noor Jehan was born in the wild 17 years ago, and was shipped from Tanzania to Pakistan later. The elephant, as per latest reports, continues to be immobile and requires immense care to be fed and washed.
Following the public outcry, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Climate Change Senator Sherry Rehman urged the provincial Sindh government to close down the zoo due to its lack of capacity to care for the wild animals.
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The provincial government has now said that it will shift the animals kept in the zoo to ‘safer places’.
But so far, reports in the Pakistani media suggest that the shifting of animals is yet to take place. On social media, the visuals of animals kept in the zoo, have gone viral.
In one of the pictures, crocodiles are seen soaking up the sun at the zoo. But their bodies remain splattered with blood-red spots because paan and gutka-consuming visitors of the zoo spat on them, The News reported.
In others, young lions appear unfed and undernourished.
Not just in Pakistan but throughout the world, the existence of zoos has been a matter of contention between authorities and the animal rights activists. This is majorly because of the captor-abuser notions associated with zoos.
But in Pakistan, the cause of zoo closure is not ethical but rather financial.
“Please close down Karachi Zoo. Zoos should be banned, specially in a country where we don’t have money to feed and care for humans, no one is bothered about the voiceless, helpless animals. Animals do not belong in cages. What Noor Jehan has gone through is inhumane torture,” Zunaira Khan, a research analyst, wrote on Twitter.
Amid skyrocketing inflation, political conflict between Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and surging terrorism, Pakistan is facing a disastrous economic outlook due to its massive external debt obligations. This financial crunch of unprecedented proportions has come to affect every visible aspect of the country, including wildlife.
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