Hong Kong should be taking the lead when it comes to animal welfare and protection – not following in
the footsteps of the mainland writes Lynne O’Donnell.

It seems a long time since the modern world began to doubt the sagacity of keeping wild animals caged for the amusement of a paying public. Having made the commitment, however, and learned that people will pay to gaze at exotic fauna, it was never likely that even the most forward-thinking communities would abandon zoos all together.

What did happen, though, was a movement to recreate, as much as was possible, the natural environment of the captured animals to ensure they were as comfortable as possible in unnatural surroundings. Australia’s zoos long ago began renovating their already vast areas, and now rank among the best and most sensitive in the world.

China lags a long way behind. I recall that while following former president Jiang Zemin up the eastern coast, from Melbourne to Port Douglas, during his 1998 visit, being asked to write a story on why Chinese zoos did not, at the time, have any Australian wildlife on display. “Because they are cruel,” a Canberra official told me. A visit to any Chinese zoo or wildlife park provides disturbing evidence to back up that rather undiplomatic explanation.

A visit to the Beijing Zoo in the early ‘90s found beagles – shivering with distemper, cold and stress – in open concrete pens in the middle of winter. The zoo’s restaurant served dumplings of dog meat, as well as donkey meat steaks. At Shanghai Zoo on a holiday with my parents years ago, other visitors threw plastic bags and lit cigarettes into the open mouths of the hippopotamuses paddling in filthy, fetid water.

Stories abound of safari parks where lions are fed live animals for the titillation of visitors. Pandas, which the Chinese communist regime appears to have adopted as a national symbol, will readily reproduce in the wild, animal experts have told me. It is when they are held captive that they fail, or refuse, to mate and have young. The baby boom that zoologists have been trumpeting over the past year or so is clearly the result of scientific manipulation.

Panda diplomacy is one of the most hypocritical – and profitable – stunts perpetrated by the international zoological community. The panda is considered endangered and thus protected by international treaties. Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the panda, like the Asiatic black bear, cannot be bought, sold or rented, and nor can any by-product, such as fur, paws and bile.

Nevertheless, zoos across the world clamour to have a panda or two because they attract millions upon millions of paying visitors. One would have thought that Hong Kong, which likes to think of itself as a civilised “world city,” would have been a rung above mainland China when it comes to treatment of wild animals.

Not so. Hong Kong’s zoo, I am ashamed and dismayed to say, puts me in mind of those in China.

I regularly walk through the grounds of Hong Kong’s zoo and botanical gardens, as I often take an early morning hike along Bowen Road and this is my best route. While many of the cages are far too small for their occupants – and keep getting smaller as the animals breed, it is the orang-utan enclosure that provides the most damning indictment of Hong Kong’s zookeepers and, by extension, the city’s residents.

Merkeda and her daughter Raba are kept in what one animal rights campaigner described to me as a “torture chamber”.
Indeed, the cage may be big, but there is not one blade of grass, not a tree – in fact no vegetation at all, let alone a sensitive, 21st century attempt to replicate the natural jungle habitat of these noble creatures. The closest it gets is green paint on the concrete. The animals themselves are clearly depressed and oppressed, among the saddest specimens of animal life I can imagine. They are a disgrace, and only make me think less of Hong Kong and its people.

Animal lovers in Hong Kong – indeed, anyone with any self respect – should be demanding that these orang-utans are sent back to Borneo so they can live out their days in a natural jungle environment. And this should happen immediately. ■