Posted on 08/08/2006 8:49:27 PM PDT by Drew68
Five of the popular animals euthanized after girl, 9, is bitten
BY MEGGEN LINDSAY
Pioneer Press
Public condolences poured into the Minnesota Zoo on Friday, as zoo visitors and staff mourned the deaths of an entire meerkat family.
Kids raced to the outdoor exhibit in Apple Valley and plastered their hands against the glass, only to find nothing inside. A small boy in a stroller wailed as his mother told him the creatures were away on vacation.
"This is a hard day. This was frustrating, sad and totally avoidable," said Tony Fisher, zoo collections manager. "People need to respect the barriers we put up to keep the public back. Instead, they try to climb over them, under them and around them."
The five meerkats were euthanized Thursday, a day after a 9-year-old girl reached her hand into the exhibit and was bitten.
The meerkats — two adults and their three babies born in spring — were vaccinated for rabies, but state health protocol required that they be killed and tested because the girl's parents didn't want her to undergo a series of six painful rabies shots.
The meerkats did not have rabies, tests done at the Minnesota Board of Animal Health showed Friday.
"Although we knew there was just a minute chance they had rabies, we had no choice in this," Fisher said. "Of course, the public's safety comes first."
Well-wishers called the zoo all day, and the zoo's e-mail inboxes were filled to capacity with mostly sympathetic words, spokeswoman Kelly Lessard said.
The meerkats' deaths marks the first time an animal bit a guest and was put down at the zoo, Fisher said. Zookeepers have been bitten before, but always underwent the rabies shots.
Meerkats have been on display at the zoo since 2001 and are one of its more popular attractions. The animals, made famous in Disney's "The Lion King" movie, are 12-inch tall members of the mongoose family. They live in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, dwelling in elaborate underground tunnel systems.
"They are active, curious creatures. They live as a family unit," Fisher said.
Although not typically aggressive, they bite if they feel threatened. Keepers use gloves when handling them.
"We display exotic, dangerous species here at the zoo," Fisher said. "That's the business we are in."
Mary Wahl of New Brighton and her multitude of daycare charges headed straight for the meerkat exhibit Friday afternoon, only to find it barren.
"It's really too bad," Wahl said. "We love seeing them every year. They are so little and active."
She said the outdoor exhibit looked perfectly safe. "Parents need to watch their kids better," Wahl said. "And a 9-year-old really should know better."
But Eden Prairie mom Liz Schewe said she wasn't surprised the exhibit's barriers were bridged. She called herself an "overprotective mom" but said she has wondered about the exhibit's safety.
"It's definitely given me pause in the past," Schewe said. "My 4-year-old is a monkey, and he could probably climb right over."
The girl had to work to get her hand inside the enclosure. Zoo officials said she must have crawled over a driftwood barrier, climbed up more than 3 feet of artificial rock and reached over 4 feet of Plexiglas to get her arm into the exhibit.
Because meerkats stand just a foot tall on their hind legs, she had to have dangled her hand low for an animal to bite her finger, they said.
"The barriers seemed fairly obvious to us and we've gone five years where nothing happened," zoo communications director Sue Gergen said. "But kids are braver and the animals are cute."
The exhibit will be closed for at least a week, while additional barrier measures are added. Zoo staff was already working on the modifications Friday.
A second group of four male meerkats will be moved from an adjacent indoor exhibit to the outdoor one when the adjustments are complete.
The zoo hopes to bring in a female next year to restart the breeding process.
"We'll be starting over to get a new family group," Fisher said.
Meggen Lindsay can be reached at mlindsay@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5260.
ABOUT MEERKATS
Home range: Kalahari Desert, southern Africa.
Size: 12 inches, with an 8-inch tail; average weight, 2 pounds.
Life span: 12 to 14 years.
Diet: Scorpions, insects, worms, small mammals and reptiles, birds, eggs, tubers and roots.
Food for: Eagles and jackals.
Social life: Live in groups of five to 30 members, called "gangs" or "mobs." Females typically have litters of two to five young and can breed year-round in captivity.
Dwelling: Grass-lined burrows. All members of the gang use a common latrine. Other gangs are not welcome and will be attacked.
To learn more, go to www.meerkats.com
They're cute. No real choice when it comes to human life though...
Oh, for crying out loud...! What nonsense. The zoo could do nothing else, and as a matter of public health policy, it was sensible.
This was posted a few days ago and pulled.
It wasn't an issue between a human or a meerkat life, but a meerkat's life and a little girl who was dumb enough to put her hand in the animal's cage having to get rabies shots because "they hurt."
This is bad parenting at its finest.
well, thats timely
What a waste indeed. They could have been quarantined.
Pathetic.
Or they could have simply given the girl rabies shots. They wouldn't have needed to destroy the vaccinated animals just to prove to her parents that they didn't have rabies!
Well the kid was only 9. Mistakes happen.
Thanks for the info.
Yes, it's very unfortunate that non-posthumous test for rabies hasn't yet been developed. But human life trumps cute little critters any day, IMO.
This is just one of the really dumb things people do. Like the zoo bears who were killed earlier this year in Virginia, I think.
Do you know why it was pulled? I did a search for it.
There is a reason there are quarantines. There was no reason to kill these animals.
This is disgraceful, and not a question of humans being more important than animals. It was sheer stupidity and waste.
>Well the kid was only 9. Mistakes happen.
And you are supposed to learn from your mistakes. The shots would have helped the kid learn. I don't think that the meerkats learned anything from this experience.
Don't they test BEFORE they euthanize animals to see it they have the disease?
Geesh!
Nine?
That's old enough to learn a lesson.
What does this child learn? You can break the rules and the little people will pay for it?
We're turning our children into Liberals.
The meerkats were destroyed because the girl's parents did not want her to get rabies shots.
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