When you keep carnivores or omnivores in an enclosure with, well, things made of meat, sooner or later you’re going to run into this kind of trouble.
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – 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.
[…] 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.
Zoo officials, who described the incident as a “temporary disturbance” in the “harmony” of the enclosure, where the macaques and bears have coexisted for some time without incident, are moving the monkeys elsewhere.
Katherine went to the Denver Zoo yesterday, on a field trip. Didn’t run into something like this, though, so far as we know.