At a Chinese zoo, a dog was placed in a wolf’s cage
Dogs evolved from wolves, but the two animals are not identical. Except, apparently, if you’re in charge of a zoo in central China. Visitors to the Xiangwahan Zoo in the city of Xiangy in Hubei Province were surprised last week when they discovered a Rottweiler dog in the wolf cage.
A video of a zoo visitor photographing the cage went viral. “Heb-heb, are you a wolf?”, The critic exclaimed in Chinese, while in English the translation was a little more successful – “? Woof! Are you a wolf”.
A tiger moves in circles at a zoo in China in April 2020
The BBC reports that the case has once again raised questions – especially in China, and against the backdrop of the Corona period – whether it is time to put an end to zoos and replace them with conservation parks or safaris. This was reminiscent of an earlier case. Then, in April last year, a “depressed” tiger was photographed moving in circles in a cage at a Beijing zoo. Watch both videos at the beginning of the article.
The videographer of the dog in the wolf cage told Chinese media that the zoo staff told him that “there used to be a wolf in the cage, but he died of old age.” According to reports in China, a zoo worker said the dog only stayed at the zoo for a short time, which also houses (real) lions and tigers. In the meantime, the sign declaring that it was a cage containing a wolf was removed by order of the authorities.
The same worker admitted that the zoo – like many others in the Corona period – was suffering from financial difficulties. “We do not have enough visitors for the zoo to function properly,” he said. The economy in Xianing was hit hard last year. The city is not far from Wuhan, the focal point of the initial eruption of the corona, and was one of many cities in Hubei Province that were subject to a tight closure from January to March last year.
In any case, the jokes at the expense of the zoo were not long in coming. “At least put a husky, he looks more like a wolf,” grinned a surfer on the Chinese social network Vivo. And this is not the first case of its kind in China. In 2019 a similar video shows a dog in a wolf cage in nearby Wuhan. In 2017 a zoo in Guankashi promised there would be penguins, but visitors found inflatable penguin dolls. And many times donkeys were painted to look like zebras.