more animal follies

there is a zoo in kabul, afghanistan. we shall for now put aside the ethics of keeping animals in zoos, but i think we can all agree running a zoo is an expensive proposition. am i the only one thinking that comes the end of the week, there isn't always enough monkey chow to go around? maybe part of the entertainment enjoyed by the 10,000 visitors on a weekend is the animals eating each other.

in the kabul zoo, there is a pig. it is reportedly the only pig in the entire country and was a gift from china. (they couldn't pony up enough yuan to send two pigs? poor lonely piggy!) the pig is now in quarantine because some visitors expressed concern they might catch swine flu from it. the pig has never been to mexico. there are no direct flights from kabul to mexico. no one in afghanistan has swine flu, and i'll wager very few have ever been to mexico.

"For now the pig is under quarantine, we built it a room because of swine influenza," Aziz Gul Saqib, director of Kabul Zoo, told Reuters. "We've done this because people are worried about getting the flu."

so yes, people everywhere are stupid, but maybe his special pig room is nicer than where he was kept before with a bunch of scaredy muslims staring at him all day.

but wait...

so i clicked on the link because of the pig, but the ending of the story is what made my day:

Shabby and rundown, Kabul Zoo is a far cry from zoos in the developed world, but has nevertheless come a long way since it suffered on the front line of Afghanistan's 1992-4 civil war.

Mujahideen fighters then ate the deer and rabbits and shot dead the zoo's sole elephant. Shells shattered the aquarium.

One fighter climbed into the lion enclosure but was immediately killed by Marjan, the zoo's most famous inhabitant. The man's brother returned the next day and lobbed a hand grenade at the lion leaving him toothless and blind.

that's showin' him!