Gone are the tigers at Guha's Tiger & Lion Farm, a modest roadside zoo near Bracebridge in Ontario's Muskoka region; they've all been shipped off for breeding. Also gone is the wolf that shared a cage with a tiger, sleeping in a refrigerator.
And now Bhino the black jaguar is gone as well, felled by an OPP bullet Tuesday after the animal escaped from its cage and began savaging the zoo owner's chained-up dog Blue, an Australian shepherd.
Blue, too, had to be shot, so severe were the dog's injuries. All of which has left proprietor Nanda Guha in great distress.
The dozens of roadside zoos that dot Ontario's rural highways and remain largely unregulated if they host non-Canadian wildlife have long been a sore point with animal-rights activists.
Mr. Guha, however, blames scavenging foxes for the loss of his beloved Bhino, who in happier times used to play with Blue and for years lived in Mr. Guha's house. "I was feeding him some raw meat and the foxes later swarmed on his cage and he must have been really upset with those foxes," he recounted. "Some of the food must have dropped out of my hand and a bunch of foxes came to eat that, and he must have been terribly upset about that because he made a little hole in the fence."
When the Ontario Provincial Police were summoned, "I wanted to stun him and put him in another cage, but there was no taser or tranquillizer gun. So the only choice we had was to shoot him, for the safety of the neighbours.
"This didn't happen because of anybody's fault, it happened because of the fault of nature. If those foxes hadn't been there, this wouldn't have happened."
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I feel sorry for the animals. I also feel sorry for Mr. Guha, losing all his animals. It seems like he liked them.
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