It’s bad enough that animals in zoos don’t get to live in their natural habitats, but some animals in Indonesia’s famous Taman Safari zoo in Cisarua, West Java, had to put up with what appears to have been the drunken shenanigans of a few of the zoo’s visitors.
Yesterday, several videos that were originally posted by two Instagram accounts using the platform’s Stories feature were reuploaded by news aggregator account @ndorobeii. The videos show several instances of alleged animal abuse by a group of friends as they were driving through Taman Safari’s animal enclosures.
The first clip shows one man spitting what appears to be Orang Tua, a type of Indonesian red wine, from inside the car directly into the mouth of a hippo, resulting in the uncontrollable laughter of his friends in the car. The next two clips show the friends dangling a carrot to lure a deer to get close to their car before pouring the drink into the unsuspecting animal’s mouth, causing it to flee. They also seemingly tried to trick a zebra as well in the next clip, but whether they succeeded or not is not shown.
The clips inevitably caused outrage and went viral in Indonesia. Both Instagram accounts are inaccessible as of the time of writing, but one of them posted an apology asking the public’s forgiveness for her and her friends’ stupidity, as relayed by @ndorobeii:
That said, Taman Safari says they are taking legal steps against the group for allegedly abusing their animals.
“TSI (Taman Safari Indonesia) is taking the legal step of reporting the incident to the relevant authorities and they are continuously coordinating with our legal department. We are disappointed, angered and struck by the stupid actions (of the people in the videos),” wrote Taman Safari Indonesia representative Yulius H. Suprihardo in a press release, as picked up by Kumparan today.
“On the one hand, Taman Safari Indonesia, as an ex-situ conservation body, has been working it’s hardest to take care of and preserve animals that were given to us by the state. On the other there are those who deliberately hurt the animals with disgraceful actions.”
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