Animal deaths raise alarm at ex-Argentina zoo
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Shaki was 18 when she died — too young given the life expectancy of a giraffe. Ruth the rhinoceros was recovering from an infection until she fell, was stuck for hours in thick mud and then died.
The recent deaths have fueled charges by conservationists that an attempt by the Buenos Aires’ government to turn a 140-yearold zoo into a less intensive “eco-park” and relocate most of its 1,500 animals to sanctuaries has been a poorly planned disaster.
A coalition of more than a dozen environmental and veterinary groups has issued a letter denouncing a “state of abandonment” at the site, where about 200 animals have died since 2016. And more recently, a former zoo director filed a complaint demanding an investigation into the deaths of Shaki and Ruth, arguing that a lack of resources and the stress from nearby construction work contributed to their demise.
“A year ago, I said that this institution was not Noah’s Ark, but the Titanic on its course to be shipwrecked,” said Claudio Bertonatti, ex-director of the Buenos Aires zoo and consultant for the Fundacion Azara non-governmental organization. “Today, we’ve crashed into an iceberg.”
The zoo was inaugurated in 1875 on what was then a quiet patch on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It was later a favorite haunt of Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges, who was fascinated by the tigers and wrote about them in his books. But as the megalopolis grew, the zoo became surrounded by an urban sprawl of busy avenues with honking buses and screeching cars near the animal enclosures, where on a recent day a solitary lion spent his time chasing his tail in circles.
The antiquated enclosures were widely considered inhumane by modern standards, as were the noisy environment and pollution, and pressure from animal rights groups grew to close the zoo.
“The situation of captivity is degrading for the animals, and it’s not the way to take care of them,” said Buenos Aires Mayor Horacio Rodriguez Larreta when he announced the zoo’s closure in 2016.
But the task remained to find new homes for the animals, hundreds of which still remain behind bars at the site in noisy limbo two years later.
Developers of Eco Park, as the site is now called, say there have been improvements to the enclosures and the 45-acre site has been closed to the public, reducing the stress on the animals. Some 432 of them have been transferred so far, including two grizzly bears sent to The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado, three alligators to Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary in Georgia and a Fiji crested iguana to the San Diego Zoo.