(CN) safari park shame: That's entertainment?

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South China Morning Post

 

Mainland safari parks are neglecting animal welfare in favour of making a

quick profit. And, such brutal exploitation is drawing plenty of fans

 

Richard Jones

Mar 15, 2009

 

Children, wide-eyed with fear, stare as a goat is dragged from a small pen

by its tail and tossed into an enclosure teeming with lions. The young

animal is ripped to shreds in seconds in a maelstrom of blood and flesh. Now

open-mouthed and shocked, the children had been petting the animal just

moments before its death, pushing their hands through the bars of its cage

to be licked. The parent who paid to see the goat's demise looks pleased

with himself. Perhaps he thinks it has provided some kind of education for

the children. Perhaps he just enjoyed the display. Either way, his son has

seen something that will be forever ingrained in his memory.

 

This is Badaling Safari World, on the outskirts of Beijing, but you can find

animal cruelty enacted as public spectacle closer to home. A few kilometres

from the Hong Kong border, thousands of families crowd into a Shenzhen

Safari Park stadium every weekend to witness an " animal extravaganza " that

features emaciated bears being humiliated in a circus-like show in which

they must perform acrobatics, wrestle and balance on high wires.

 

The Badaling and Shenzhen facilities are just two of the mainland's

approximately 80 " safari parks " , spread from icy Harbin in the northeast to

the jungles of southern Yunnan province. The owners of the new-style " family

animal adventure parks " see them as being superior to the cramped

Soviet-style zoos that were built in the 1970s. The new parks feature larger

enclosures and elevated walkways for visitors.

 

Alongside the improvements, however, are shows that would be considered

shameful in Hong Kong.

 

" The visitors expect a performance, " says Huang Xianda, a manager at

Shenzhen Safari Park, which took 1 million yuan (HK$1.1 million) a day

during the Lunar New Year. " It's the focal point of the whole day for them. "

 

Such performances enable the parks to charge entrance fees of between 80

yuan and 120 yuan, although someone will have to pay more if a kill is to be

witnessed. Many safari parks have a menu that lists the " live food "

available. Ducks and chickens cost between 20 yuan and 40 yuan while a cow

costs 1,600 yuan. The fluffy goat in Beijing was bought for 600 yuan.

 

Many of the parks have adapted buses to drive visitors among the " roaming "

animals. The buses have crates of fowl onboard and pipes fitted on the

sides. From a distance, they look like military vehicles, complete with

stubby rocket launchers. Instead of grenades, though, the launchers fire

ducks and chickens towards waiting lions and tigers. The petrified birds are

devoured in a gulp or two while visitors photograph the proceedings.

 

Live animal shows have been repeatedly condemned by animal-rights groups.

 

" We need to consider the harm done to people, especially children.

Witnessing animal abuse is a form of child abuse, " says Briton Carol McKenna

of One Voice, a French animal-welfare group. " This kind of behaviour belongs

in the Victorian or Roman age. The safari parks are perverting any reason

for their own existence. "

 

Years of negative overseas publicity seemed to be working in 2005, when

representatives from 22 of the mainland's animal reserves and zoos agreed to

ban live feeding due to the " negative psychological effect on visitors " . The

State Forestry Administration issued a statement that concluded,

" Performances that include feeding live animals to wild beasts must be

stopped. "

 

Several park directors said the policy would make it " harder to survive

financially " , however, and the good intentions did not last long. It soon

became clear that the government had more important things on its agenda

than animal welfare; there are still no laws against live animal feeding or

animal cruelty on the mainland. (The photographs used in this article were

taken after the 2005 agreement was made.) The Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park

in Guilin, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, replaced a thrice-daily

" live cattle feeding " programme in a purpose-built auditorium with

less-gruesome but still disturbing bear-boxing bouts in response to negative

publicity overseas. The cattle feeding has continued, but in a field rather

than in the auditorium. Each afternoon, a tiger is set upon a cow. The

unfortunate animal is mauled but rarely killed outright. Park workers

usually finish the job off by running over the half-dead animal with a

tractor, another part of the show.

 

" We can't stop it because the public love it, " says Xiongsen's manager, who

claims that the feeding " prepares the tigers for their release into the

wild " .

 

Despite the mainland's abysmal record, animal-rights groups are trying,

often in vain, to make a difference. Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation

(www.animalsasia.org) runs awareness programmes across the country and there

are several local animal-rights groups springing up.

 

" You ask for positive comments about moves to increase animal welfare in

China? " says a spokesman for the Beijing Animal Rescue Group. " Should I lie

or what? The situation is not optimistic at all.

 

" We are still fighting very hard for animals' legal status. Unless animal

welfare is acknowledged by law, it is useless and meaningless. [Even] human

rights are [not] protected. The country is focused only on economic growth

and other issues are a long way behind. "

 

Yao Jing, from China Small Animal Protection, says, " Fighting for animal

welfare is very, very difficult and it is such a long and tough process for

things even to begin to change. "

 

The Kunming Safari Park, in Yunnan province, stopped selling live chickens

to throw to its tigers before the Beijing Olympics, last summer. Instead, it

began selling strips of beef and chicken legs attached to fishing lines, for

10 yuan each. Lines of people " fish the tigers " from raised walkways. The

big cats, goaded relentlessly, pace back and forth and shake their heads:

tell-tale signs of mental distress. A 10-year-old boy called King says he

spends 50 yuan every weekend taunting the tigers.

 

" They are smart and fast and it's fun to trick them, " he says, fishing rod

in hand. " It tests [me] to see if I am smarter and stronger than them. "

 

McKenna says, " The aim of a safari park should be to see animals in an

environment where they are able to behave as naturally as possible. The

visitors should not be encouraged to make any contact with the animals. It

shows a complete and utter lack of respect for the animals. "

 

Ever alert to new ways of extracting money from tourists, park managers have

started selling photo opportunities. First with elephants and bears, more

recently with lions and tigers.

 

At the Xishuangbanna Park, in Jinghong, Yunnan, on the Vietnamese border,

brightly dressed keepers reassure visitors that everything is completely

safe.

 

" Just 20 yuan. Come and meet the king cat, " they shout to visitors standing

around a rusty cage. The tourists haggle over the price and seem more

bothered about parting with 20 yuan than being mauled by the lion.

 

" Stunts like this [using animals for photographs] disconnect us from the

animal world. We should not expose children to it since it removes them from

the reality that tigers are powerful, majestic carnivores, " says Jill

Robinson, of Animals Asia.

 

Cowed they may be but captive animals can still lash out. In February 2007,

in Kunming Zoo, six-year-old Mo Ruixin was about to have her photograph

taken standing next to a juvenile tiger. As she posed, the animal attacked

and bit her head.

 

" In an instant the tiger had Mo, " says Li Kunli, the girl's mother,

clutching a picture of her daughter. " A third of her head was in the tiger's

mouth. The keepers panicked. They were boys, just 18 years old. They didn't

know what to do. They picked up a wooden bench and hit the tiger on the

head. The keeper kept hitting the tiger, which made it angrier. The tiger

spat my daughter's head out and then bit even harder into it. "

 

Li summoned the strength to pull her daughter free herself. As she talks she

shows her scarred hands and begins to sob, " I knew at that moment that my

daughter was dead. There was a lot of blood and her wounds were horrific. "

 

Li ran to the closest hospital with her mutilated daughter in her arms. The

doctor stitched up the wounds but pronounced the child dead. Kunming Zoo has

since been forced to stop the photograph sessions with its big cats.

 

A combination of mismanagement, badly trained staff and the goading of

animals has resulted in a rising number of deaths. There have been 21

recorded fatalities in the past five years in mainland parks and zoos and at

least nine recorded attacks by a lion or tiger in the past two years. The

true number of these attacks is probably much higher as zoo and park

managers attempt to keep accidents covered up by paying off families.

 

Six weeks before Mo was killed in Kunming, a four-year-old was mauled by a

tiger in the city's safari park. The badly injured boy survived. Last

February, 10-year-old Hu Runqun was standing too close to a lions' cage at

Wanfota Park, in eastern China. He lost his arm. Two weeks before that, the

parents of a nine-year-old boy were given 150,000 yuan in compensation after

their son was eaten alive by crocodiles. Three friends who witnessed the

attack (the boys had been inside the compound, goading the reptiles) are

still undergoing psychological treatment for nightmares.

 

" The safety record is beyond belief. The death rates speak for themselves, "

says Robinson.

 

A visit to most parks is a risky undertaking. At the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger

Park, many of the 1,000-plus tigers that have been reared here are separated

from the public by a 3mm-thick chain-mail fence. Packs of big cats stalk

anyone who gets too close to the barrier. The audiences at most of the

performances are on the same level as the animals and are separated from

irritable and hungry tigers, lions and bears by nothing more than rusting

wire mesh or nylon netting.

 

Rather than step up costly safety measures, park owners prefer to render

animals harmless. A tiger at the Xishuangbanna Park is fed sleeping tablets

before scores of visitors climb on its back for a photograph. Many of the

bears performing in Shenzhen have had their teeth filed down and appear half

starved and petrified of their trainers.

 

" Canine teeth have been deliberately cut back, " says Robinson, viewing

images of the bears. " The remaining stumps are flattened and expose pulp and

nerves. This will be excruciatingly painful.

 

" One of the moon bears is pitifully thin for a juvenile bear, with the scars

and terrified eyes symptomatic of an animal trained by violence. Mothers are

often killed in the wild so that cubs can be captured and `trained' from an

early age, " she adds. " These bears are clearly victims of training using

negative reinforcement - perpetual beating and food deprivation - until they

are forced to get the trick right. "

 

When questioned about their diet, Huang says, " The bears are normally clumsy

if they eat too much and they cannot perform well. Looking thin and looking

good is great. "

 

Even the panda, the mainland's " national treasure " , is being exploited. The

mainland's two largest panda breeding bases and many zoos have time slots

when, for a fee of about 1,000 yuan, tourists can have a photograph taken

holding a bear. But pandas are not as cuddly as they appear. At least one

western tourist at the Wolong Giant Panda Breeding Centre has been badly

bitten and last year a keeper lost part of a finger. A Hong Kong tourist was

dragged to safety after being mauled by half a dozen juvenile pandas during

a photo opportunity at Wolong two years ago.

 

Dr Kati Loeffler, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and an expert

on captive giant pandas, says that making the bears " pose " is " very

damaging " and " does nothing at all for conservation " . What worries her most

is the potential for the transmission of disease from humans to pandas. " All

it takes is for someone to cough or sneeze at a vulnerable animal with the

right virus or bacteria ... it is just a matter of time. "

 

A Shenzhen Safari Park keeper was recently fired for selling panda photo

opportunities. The keeper, surnamed Yuan, was charging tourists 10 yuan a go

to feed a panda apple portions on a bamboo pole while others took pictures.

The keeper was allegedly starving the 25-year-old bear in order to ensure

she would get into the correct position when offered the apple. The panda,

Yong Ba, is one of China's oldest and most successful breeders and has

earned the nicknames Panda No1 and Hero Mother. The practice has been

stopped but the " hero mother " is now referred to on mainland blogs as the

" lonely panda " .

 

During the Lunar New Year, her enclosure was unsupervised and visitors used

flash photography to take pictures of the distressed-looking panda while

children banged on the glass-walled cage. Yong Ba fared better than the red

panda in the open enclosure next door. Sweets and snacks had been tossed

into its cage and milk had been poured over the animal.

 

" Feeding the animals the snacks that the visitors bring with them allows the

visitors to bond with various animals, " claims Huang.

 

Nearby, a crowd packed with children was roaring with delight as several

bears were forced to ride bicycles and do somersaults in front of the

Olympic rings. To the cheers of the crowd, a tall man wrestled with a bear,

pushing, pulling and hitting it. The fight was not a fair one; the terrified

bear's teeth had been filed down to stumps and it howled as it was finally

wrestled to the floor.

 

" This so-called entertainment simply teaches children the size, shape and

colour of a bear and nothing about its status as an endangered species. It

is a terrible shame that the next generation, who should be fighting to

protect these animals, are taught to disrespect them, " says Robinson.

 

Huang describes animal performances as the " fun part " .

 

" The children love the circus shows. In this way, we can show children and

visitors that animals can learn and they are smart. [if they] love the

animals first, then humans can become aware of the need to protect such

lovely animals. "