for National Geographic News
What do you do with a gorgeous Arabian horse that has run into a lethal metal mesh net and died? In war-torn Baghdad, if you're trying to save lives at the city's zoo, you feed the carcass to the lions and hope no one gets mad.
The zoo is home to about 50 animals—brown bears, lions, cheetahs, a lone wolf, a badger—that survived the siege of Baghdad.
It's hard to imagine how. Once one of the largest zoos in the Middle East, housing some 600 animals, the grounds of the Baghdad Zoo became a major battlefield when U.S.-led coalition forces reached the city.
"You can almost see why Saddam might have picked it as a place where he could dig in," said Stephan Bognar. "It's near all the large palaces, with lots of trees and cover."
Bognar works for WildAid, a wildlife conservation organization based in San Francisco. He has just returned from six weeks in Baghdad, working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, to stabilize the situation at the zoo.
The animals had been poorly fed prior to the start of the war. When hostilities broke out, zookeepers fled, and the animals were left to starve, living in cages without food, water, and in some cases, access to sunlight.
The fierce fighting between the Iraqi Republican Guard and the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division left the newly remodeled animal enclosures riddled with mortar and gunfire holes, and the grounds littered with unexploded ordnance. When Baghdad fell, looters took over, and the zoo population dropped at one point to about six animals.
The lion enclosure had been hit during a mortar attack, leaving a 6-meter (20-foot) hole in the wall. A couple of lions escaped; one attacked a horse and brought it down; unfortunately the soldiers who came upon it had to shoot it as it charged. A starving brown bear roaming the city killed three Iraqi civilians before she was recaptured. The zoo's two giraffes were eaten. A baboon was found wandering in the desert and rescued by the U.S. Army. Many animals were stolen for the exotic pet trade, and many were eaten.
But finding the animals was just one of many problems. The animals still at the zoo were starving and filthy, the zookeepers gone, the zoo stripped of everything from cleaning supplies to toilet flushers.
"When I walked in the animals were starving, there were feces on the wall, everywhere; the place was filthy; it was really disgusting," said Bognar. "And looters had just stripped the place."
Surviving Together
"It was important to let people know right away that we weren't there just feeding the animals and letting the people starve," said Bognar. "We see the zoo as a community, and that includes both the people and the animals."
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
