Killing tigers to entertain the rich and other recent animal outrages
Tony, a Siberian Tiger, sits in a renovated big cat grotto at the San Francisco Zoo Feb. 21, 2008 in San Francisco, California. The San Francisco Zoo reopened its big cat grottos for public viewing almost two months after a man was fatally mauled by a Siberian tiger that escaped from its enclosure on Christmas day. On Sept. 21, 2012, a man in the New York was attacked by a tiger after jumping into its enclosure at the Bronx Zoo.
There's been a lot of depressing animal news lately.
And it keeps getting worse.
The latest animal outrages come from China and Great Britain, where pigs and tigers are being slaughtered, though for very different reasons.
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In China, more than 10 tigers have been killed as "visual feasts" to entertain officials and rich businessmen in Zhanjiang, state media reported Thursday.
A freshly-slaughtered tiger and multiple tiger products were seized in a raid earlier this month.
Apparently, the killings are seen as a way for the successful to show off their social stature.
In Great Britain, meanwhile, the British army has admitted to blowing up live pigs in an attempt to improve medical techniques on the battlefield.
Some 115 of the animals have died in the past three years at a secret base in Wiltshire, according to the Mirror.
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Medics wanted to see if the pigs, some strapped with body armor, could be saved despite suffering "severe battlefield trauma." They were also used to test blood-clotting products.
These horrors come on the heels of news that a Danish zoo killed a family of four lions to make room for a new male.
It's the same zoo in Copenhagan that killed a healthy young giraffe named Marius last month to prevent inbreeding, shooting it to death in front of a group of children.
Animal lovers have intensified calls for a public boycott of the zoo.
Others on Twitter went further, saying they wanted to see it shut down.