http://news.yahoo.com/s/a...NtZW5ld3M-



Bears Eat Monkey in Front of Zoo Visitors

Mon May 15, 10:52 PM ET

Bears killed and ate a monkey in a Dutch zoo in front of horrified visitors, witnesses and the zoo said Monday. In the incident Sunday at the Beekse Bergen Safari Park, several Sloth bears chased the Barbary macaque into an electric fence, where it was stunned.

It recovered and fled onto a wooden structure, where one bear pursued and mauled it to death.

The park confirmed the killing in a statement, saying: "In an area where Sloth bears, great apes and Barbary macaques have coexisted peacefully for a long time, the harmony was temporarily disturbed during opening hours on Sunday."

"Of course the habitats here in the safari park are arranged in such a way that one animal almost never kills another, but they are and remain wild animals," it said.

Witness Marco Berelds posted a detailed report on the incident, including photos, on a Dutch Web site. He said one Sloth bear tried unsuccessfully to shake the monkey loose after it took refuge on the structure, built of crossing horizontal and vertical poles.

Ignoring attempts by keepers to distract it, the bear climbed onto a horizontal pole, and, standing stretched on two legs, "used its sharp canines to pull the macaque, which was shrieking and resisting, from its perch."

The bear then brought the animal to a concrete den, where three bears ate it.

The zoo said it "usually wasn't possible" for keepers to intervene when an animal killed another.

The park plans now to move the Barbary macaques — which are large monkeys but often inaccurately called "Barbary Apes" — to another part of the park, it said.

Circle of Life Baby!

oh my god your icon


i feel bad for the kids who watched that happen

evenstar3 said:

I couldn't bear to watch it myself.....

ReturnofDOOK said:

ReturnofDOOK said:

the park is alive?

POOK said:

Ok...


[NSFM - Nik]

Zoo officials were able to use this tragedy as an example to teach the onlookers a lesson in obeying park regulations.

Before the shaken attendees dispersed, the keepers tranqilized the bears & were able to extract a few of the monkey-bones from the den. They then immediately charged the simian remains with a citation....for feeding the bears.

evenstar3 said:

Why? This is what happens in the wild all the time. How can we allow ourselves
to be desensitized by , say, watching fish being fed to animals in a zoo (including bears), but feel bad when it's a monkey? Ultimately they're all living things, and what transpired in that caged unnatural animal environment that we term a "zoo" happens every day in an animal's natural environment. Trust me,I'm a woman who grew up completely entrenched in the whole Disney-eque utopia/taosist world of Winnie- The-Pooh, but at the same time, I've always realized since I was small, that in a real world Darwin situation, Winnie- The-Pooh would F'*! Tigger up if it came down to a matter of being hungry and needing to survive...

evenstar3 said:

How about the fact that these children are fed with killed animals as well
[Edited 5/18/06 3:40am]

?\? True Indeed...

why ?

You may have guessed i'm a vegetarian

Dewrede said:

that's the look that crosses my face when i get shocked the s**t into an epiphany

POOK said:

POOK said:

lazycrockett said:

thanks for putting that crappy Smelton John song in my head for the rest of the day

i saw a hawk fly down and snatch up a little sparrow one afternoon. middle of the afternoon, middle of the city. hawk grabbed the birdie and flew off into the trees, poor little sparrow shrieking and screaming for its life all the way

what the bears did to the monkey is odd (the bears couldn't have been that hungry and were likely acting out of boredom? irritation? had the monkey been teasing them or something?)

but how ironic that the cruelest animals on the planet - humans- would stand around and condemn the bears. without protect we accept the extremities of torture we subject animals to in factory farms. pigs and cows are intelligent enough to be self-aware, to be afraid and to grieve for what is happening to them and their family/friend units.

far better to die like the macaque in that zoo than to be mass-produced into burgers

That bear didn't go crazy. He went bear.

I hate monkeys, but that's a really sad story. They shoulda fed the bears so they wouldn't be so hungry to kill the monkeys. WTF?

SHOCKADELICA1 said:

i hardly think the bear at the monkey because he was hungry



it's just instinct. like people who work with lions etc and
become to farmilliar with them. there will always be a day
when the animal attacks or kills you, no matter if you're a
"friend" for 20 years or so. that's just wild animals..

animals shouldn't even be kept in a typical zoo anyway together in a restrictive area.

XxAxX said:

spot on, my friend!

XxAxX said:

Wow, it's as if it didn't care about eye witnesses identifying him in court.

RebornVirgin said:

A bunch of brown bears were picked up for questioning. Profiling sucks.

RebornVirgin said:

i actually yelled at the hawk 'hey! let him go!"

That's bear-y bear-y sad.



M

XxAxX said:

sinisterpentatonic said:

such a violent planet we live on mr. sinisterpentatonic. i swear some days i want to come back as a tree next time