A lion in China's Wuhan Forest Wild Animal Zoo has been condemned to spend the rest of its life in a cage after injuring two tourists, the Shanghai Morning Post reported on Tuesday.
The stiff sentence provoked an outcry from locals in Wuhan, the capital of central China's Hubei province, the paper said.
"A mother and son were throwing hens to the lion from the open window of a bus travelling through the park, filled with untamed wild animals, on the morning of October 6, the paper said.
However a lion pounced on them, seizing the boy's right arm and dragging him out of the window, injuring his head.
The boy's mother was also scratched by the lion when she tried to wrestle her son from its clutches, the report added. She is now out of hospital although the child is still being treated for injuries.
Instead of tightening safety measures and ensuring windows are closed when buses travel through the park, the park's management decided to punish the lion, stirring up a furore in the local media.
The park applied to local police office for permission to shoot the lion but was refused after the news got out and concerned citizens came to plead mercy for the lion.
However in order to punish the miscreant beast, the zoo decided to sentence the lion to "life imprisonment", locking it in a cage and forbidding it from roaming outside with its peers.
The row is continuing, with many local residents convinced the lion is innocent and people coming to the park to see the hapless animal and plead its cause, the Shanghai paper said.
It is common for China's zoos and wild animal parks to allow tourists to feed wild animals, to generate extra cash and drum up more excitement.
The Wuhan Forest zoo sold hens for 20 yuan (US$2.4) a piece on the bus and allowed tourist to hurl them from the windows at passing predators.
Safety at Chinese zoos is lax and animals are often kept in appalling conditions.
In another incident, a Bengal tiger in a zoo in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming mauled a woman keeper to death, the China Daily newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The keeper entered a cage to feed a tiger on October 21 but failed to lock the den where the animals were kept.
The tiger concerned had been caged and was now "waiting for the results of the investigation", the report said.
(China Daily 10/23/2001)
