14 DAY TRIAL // Switzerland's Dählhölzli Zoo, otherwise known as Tierpark Dählhölzli, is now accused of having killed a brown bear cub despite the fact that there was no need for it to do so.
Media reports say that the cub in question was named Baby Bear 4, and that it was born earlier this year, to mom Masha and dad Misha, both of which were gifted to the zoo back in 2009.
By the looks of it, Masha delivered not one, but two cubs. However, dad Misha did not take a liking to any of them, and eventually killed one of the cubs.
Despite this incident, the remaining young brown bear was allowed to continue living with its family, Daily Mail informs. However, dad Misha kept bullying it, and there were reasons to believe that it would not have hesitated to kill it as well.
When faced with this situation, keepers at Dählhölzli Zoo decided that the best thing to do to keep Baby Bear 4 from being killed by Misha was to put it to sleep themselves, the same source tells us.
The death of Baby Bear 4 caught the attention of animal rights group Swiss Animal Protection, whose members and supporters are now saying that staff and management at Dählhölzli Zoo should not have killed the cub and instead should have dealt with the bullying incidents by separating the family.
The animal rights activists maintain that keeping the two cubs in the same enclosure with Misha and Masha was a bad idea to begin with, seeing how male brown bears have been documented to behave aggressively towards young animals, including their offspring.
They go on to argue that, to their knowledge, space availability is not an issue at Dählhölzli Zoo. Hence, there was no reason not to move Baby Bear 4 in a separate enclosure, and thus keep it safe from its dad.
“It is not natural to keep the male bear with the offspring, and there was more than enough space to have kept him in a separate part of the cage,” a spokesperson for Swiss Animal Protection told the press in a recent interview.
Dählhölzli Zoo defends its decision to kill the young bear and says that, apart from the fact that Misha kept attacking it, the cub was also being ignored by its mother. Zoo deputy director Jürg Hadorn explains that, if separated from its parents and placed in an enclosure all by itself, the bear cub would have likely experienced great stress and pain.
“Together with the fact that the male bear Misha had started demonstrating the same aggressive behavior as he did to cub number three, in order to protect cub number four from more stress and pain, we decided to act. As a result the baby bear was euthanized by a vet,” Jürg Hadorn said in a statement.