Imagine you were in a prison. Even if you are given a little bit of room beyond just a cramped cell, the lack of freedom can be maddening. Every day, over and over, you see the same four walls, the same little cot for a bed. Now imagine that the jailors repeatedly hurl their garbage at you, creating a disgusting heap to keep you company. You might say the cruelty is inhuman.
Yet, this is exactly the situation which faces some of the animals at Bangladesh’s Bangabandhu Safari Park in Gazipur. Images have surfaced on social media of a crocodile in its pen, lying in a pool of garbage on the banks of the enclosure.
Animal cruelty can be defined in layman’s terms as the inhuman treatment of animals. On a more legal basis, it is not only the beating and ill-treatment of an animal, but also the keeping of animals in such a manner as to cause unnecessary pain and suffering, as per the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1920.
The sorry state of the crocodile enclosure, with plastic bottles and other rubbish strewn about the place, clearly constitutes a breach of this long established law, even as cabinet seeks to take more stringent measures through the recently approved draft of the Animal Welfare Act. The accumulation of plastic poses a significant threat to the environment and wild life.
Bangabandhu Safari Park authorities were unavailable for comment when attempts were made to contact them.
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“Plastics are very long-lived products that could potentially have service over decades, and yet our main use of these lightweight, inexpensive materials are as single-use items that will go to the garbage dump within a year, where they’ll persist for centuries,” Richard Thompson, lead editor of a report on “Plastics, the environment and human health”, said in an interview with Environmental Health News in 2009.
This longevity can adversely affect wildlife in a number of ways, most notably by injuring or poisoning animals that ingest the material, the report said.
Furthermore, such accumulation of garbage also leads to a failure on the part of both the public and safari park authorities in maintaining one of the park’s main goals- the provision of an opportunity to view animals in as close to a natural habitat as possible in captivity.
Visitors must keep the park clean and safari park officials should ensure that they do so. If they do not, then a significant threat is posed to the animals. Not to mention the threat to the life of the poor soul that actually has to go in the pen to clean it up.