Human Cock Up of Gargantuan Proportions Leaves Zoo Animals Starving to Death in Venezuela

Venezuela is sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves and for that reason successive governments have depended upon revenue from the sale of oil to run laudable but mismanaged socialist programs across Venezuela for years. Now the price of oil has fallen dramatically and because the government depended upon oil so heavily without diversifying, the country has run out of money and its citizens are starving and so are its animals in their decrepit zoos.

About 50 animals have starved to death in the past six months at one of Venezuelan’s biggest zoos. The country is facing chronic food shortages across the board.

Some of the animals at Parque Zoologico Caricuao in Caracas have not been fed for a couple of weeks we are told. Shockingly, the big cats such as lions and tigers are eating mangoes. Yes, I’ll repeat that, the lions are eating bloody mangoes because there is no damned meat in this godforsaken zoo in this mismanaged country.

In a park in the western state of Tachira the administrators are pleading for donations from local businesses to feed their animals. In a zoo in Paraguana three animals died in May. The union leader at the Caracas zoo, Mr Sifontes said:

“The story of the animals at Caricuao is a metaphor for Venezuelan suffering.”

Are the people starving to death? I don’t think they are. Of course I am concerned about the people of Venezuelan but quite frankly I am more concerned about the starving animals in the zoos because they are dying and they are innocent victims of human folly.

If there weren’t zoos in this country there wouldn’t be any starving animals in them. If the government had been half decent in their management of the country there wouldn’t be any starving people either. It is a story about human folly and my God we have enough of that nowadays.