Many years ago, a saudi friend told me,” pet lions in the middle east are bought from africa for less than a camel.” To tell the truth, I didn’t take his slightly braggadocio to heart until the driver suddenly asked me,” What animal are you going to buy? A lion or an elephant?
Out of courtesy, I responded to the Chinese-style courtesy:” Look at it.”
Originally known as Pretoria, it is the political centre of one of South Africa’s three major capitals and, in practical terms, the executive capital, covering an area of about 600 square kilometres, with a population of nearly 3 million, only 60 kilometres from Johannesburg.
What are the places to travel in tswana, in addition to the more white and well-ordered, is also one of the cultural cities with a strong flights from dongying to shanghai academic atmosphere in africa. The universities of south africa, pretoria and engineering are among africa’s top research universities.
Tswane is a particularly prominent emerging city in europe.
In 1855, the Boers were founded to isolate the blacks of South Africa, the capital of the later “Republic of Teresa “. Although south africa has long declared “eliminating discrimination “, tswane is still in a black-and-white pattern, which means” white boss, black work “. So tswane doesn’t feel like an african city. Instead, it is one of africa’s most famous “garden cities “, where the streets are clean and orderly.
There are not many blacks in tswane (most of them work in factories and other indoors), and most of the streets are filled with groups of whites, arabs and asians, a significant portion of whom are not traveling to tswane but are directed at the pretoria zoo, which contains a total of 3500 african animals, amounting to more than half a million.
The park, formerly the garden of a burlesque merchant, was bought by the south african government and opened as a national park in 1916. It covers an area of about 85 hectares, half of which are on suburban hillsides, mainly for cat species such as birds, primates, sheep, horses and lion tigers.
The other part is flat, with mostly small, non-offensive animals, and visitors who don’t want to walk can also rent electric cars, or opt for top-down cable cars overlooking the panorama, or buy tickets to the aquarium and crawler separately.
As one of the world’s top eight zoos, Pretoria Zoo is highly rated on animal conservation. After the creation of the Animal Breeding Centre in 1975, it was honoured by the United Nations and the European Society for Animal Protection for its contribution to animal conservation, scientific research and reproduction.
The park, which opens to the outside world, is 0.85 square kilometers, but the scientific research and breeding center a few dozen kilometers away is 750 square kilometers, larger than the entire city of tswana. To put it another way, the zoo paid for the research center with tickets collected from outside visits, and raised a variety of animals that could be used as pets and medicinal value, eventually selling for high profits.
Pets from the breeding centre are sent to the zoo’s exhibition area, where they are divided into two main categories: adult and minor, and then into various subjects. Then there are on-site inspection, medical examination, out of the garden until delivery to the client’s home.
Almost all of the saudi feline pets described by saudi friends come from the zoo, and staff and taxi drivers describe them as estimating sales of between 150-200 orders a year, about the frequency of a single deal every two days.
In fact, the zoo in beltoria is no longer the same, and since 2010 there have been scandals of animal abuse, chronic illness and death, which have become not only a zoo without animal conservation significance, but also a commercial district with breeding animals as a profitable point.
At least 3,000 lions,5,000 tigers,20,000 rhinos and hundreds of African elephants have been sold over the past 30 years, and the number of other animals adds up to at least 50,000, according to incomplete statistics from the European NPR Network and Daily News. Buyers come from all over the world, with everything from pet shops to animal middlemen (commonly known as pet brokers), private collectors, ranchers, biology labs, circuses and even specialized animal skins.
There are no zoos on the list of buyers, because animals in captivity are too tame and prone to death due to environmental, climate-change and other factors. In fact, zoos such as europe, america, japan and south korea have also been buyers of pretoria zoos, such as two lions that japan bought at a high price in 2010 and died of illness at yokohama zoo three months later.
Since cats aren’t good to sell, they have to be flights to anhui replaced as a “staple product “.
African double-horned black rhinos are the most popular “staple” in the near future, because ivory grows too long, but the latest breed of black rhinos are different, producing enough sized horns for sale in 5-8 years, and they are no less expensive than ivory, which sells for more than $3,000 a pound and can fetch up to $15,000 after being resold to Asia. Look at this group of hornless rhinos, you can imagine how much profit a year.
The zoo has also been lampooned by conservation associations as “the poorest zoo in the world” and “poor” enough to sell even south africa’s national treasure animals (lions, buffalo, leopards, african elephants and black and white rhinos) for money.
There are no so-called after-sales, return visits and buyer surveys, all animals are clearly marked for commercial use, lions 20,000 South African rand (about 10,000 yuan), tigers 40,000 rand (about 20,000 yuan), or 45,000 rand per pound of rhino horn, and the whole can also be sold for up to 70-80 million rand. Can not really afford to choose to place in the souvenir area, because of “accidental” dead animals or local specimens.