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Mini zoo in spotlight after viral tweet
Public concern: Visitors pass the cage of a Cassowary, a protected species, put on display at a miniature zoo located at Tirta Gupti Swimming Pool, Cilodong, Depok, West Java, on Tuesday
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ublic concern: Visitors pass the cage of a Cassowary, a protected species, put on display at a miniature zoo located at Tirta Gupti Swimming Pool, Cilodong, Depok, West Java, on Tuesday. (JP/Tirta Utama Umbas)
The mini zoo inside an Army housing complex in Cilodong, Depok, West Java, has caught people’s attention following a viral Twitter post depicting the poor conditions of the animals living in the dirty cages.
The mini zoo along with the Tirta Gupti public swimming pool are within the compound area managed by the Army Strategic Reserves Command (Kostrad), adding scrutiny over the management’s capability.
For an entrance fee of Rp 15,000 (US$1.05) for children and Rp 20,000 for adults, members of the public can take a dip in one large pool and two smaller pools as well as walk around the area to look at the animals.
Local resident Muhammad Zakaria, 30, took his two children to the pool area on Tuesday to swim and took the chance to walk around the miniature zoo.
“I think the cages aren’t very clean because many visitors are littering and there’s a shortage of garbage bins available,” Zakaria said.
He also commented on the lack of animal descriptions on the cages and the visible lack of supervision in the miniature zoo.
Although by Tuesday the cages had been thoroughly cleaned with little plastic waste, organic waste remained present within the zoo as the food bucket containing rotten food in the cassowary cage was still there, and new waste could be seen such as rotten bananas in the monkey cage.
Uncaptured by the images posted on Twitter was the constant circling of flies near the animals due the rotten food.
However, photos sent by Kostrad to the Post on Wednesday morning showed that the rotten food had also been removed from the cages.
The water in the crocodile area remained a deep dark green, to the point that some visitors could not tell there were crocodiles at all when they were underwater.
The animals’ dirty living conditions were first tweeted by user @halocilukba on Sunday, showing the cages full of plastic waste and rotten food.
“What can we do about this?” @halocilukba asked in their tweet. The post quickly went viral prompting a swift response by the pool management in cleaning the cages.
The affected animals include a snake, monkeys and cassowaries, a protected species.
Anna, 28, a food vendor in the pool area said the pool had undergone renovations three years ago and the animals had been moved behind the pool.
“The animals used to be in the middle section of the pool compound, I remember it being clean and visitors were orderly,” Anna told the Post on Tuesday.
Kostrad responded swiftly to the viral post saying that the situation had been fixed.
“We thank the community for paying attention to this, we consider it a reprimand for us,” Kostrad chief spokesman Col. Adhi Giri Ibrahim said on Tuesday.
“The issue was quickly identified, and we made the necessary response to fix the problem.”
The cages were in such a state due to the large amount of people visiting on Sunday, Adhi claimed. He also said the dirty condition was due to many members of the management being still on leave, resulting in a shortage of people available to watch over the animal cages.
“Kostrad has been coordinating with the Biodiversity Convention Center of West Java in regard to keeping the animals at Tirta Gupti Swimming Pool,” Kostrad said in a statement later in the evening.
“The 1st Infantry Division is currently in talks about whether it can keep the animals for child education or transfer them to Ragunan Zoo for further preservation.” (tru)
