An Egyptian zoo’s dirty little secret
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At the Giza Zoo in Cairo, Egypt, workers are paid such low wages that in the past few years they have stolen hundreds of animals to sell as pets, or worse, to eat for dinner, Bloomberg reports:
When two Moroccan camels were butchered in August, the perpetrators left behind only the hide and hooves. A police investigation found that a zookeeper had slaughtered the animals and sold the meat to supplement his monthly wage. More than 400 animals, including foxes, zebras, a black panther and a giraffe, have vanished from the government-run menagerie in the last three years, according to police documents. Zoo conditions have grabbed headlines in a country where people criticize President Hosni Mubarak for everything from crumbling schools and hospitals to the low wages and rising food prices that have sparked violent protests. ‘The zoo is a living example of the mess our country has become,’ said Ahmed Sherbiny, chairman of the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends. ‘It is a combination of corruption, the death of work ethic, mismanagement and apathy.’
The overall picture is bleak: a zoo of faded glory--once a turn-of-the-century marvel, now littered with trash and housing fewer and fewer depressed animals in narrow cages. Most of the visitors come for the cheap admission and to ‘eat, sleep, throw orange peels at the animals and then leave a pile of trash behind them,’ according to the zoo’s chairman, Nabil Sedqui.
Economic hard times have made it difficult for zoo workers to make ends meet. Zookeepers are paid a civil servant’s minimum wage: $22.50 a month.
With limited funds in mind, activists are opposing the government-run zoo’s spending $250,000 on a new giraffe, fearing that it too, will be stolen.
--Tony Barboza