Three other tigers are reportedly in poor health.

The zoo, which is run by the city government, is short of cash because of the falling number of visitors in the past few years. Mayor Bobby will not go to jail because Indonesia does not have strong laws to protect animals. But he is not completely off the hook.

He and the zoo managers must be held to account. At the very least, they should prevent more deaths among the tigers, or any other animals for that matter, in the care of the zoo.

Taking animals from their natural habitats and putting them inside cages for display is already a cruel act. Yet besides their entertainment value, zoos serve as educational spaces for children to learn about other creatures and their ecosystems on Earth. Some zoos run research centers for animal conservation purposes. Zoos are public goods that should be properly managed.

The animals in captivity (and sadly inside cages) deserve better treatment. Their lives and well-being are in our hands, more precisely in the hands of zoo managers.

It is not that Indonesia lacks laws to protect animals, but they are just on paper and are perhaps rarely enforced against zoos. Despite the public outcry upon the news of the tigers’ deaths, no one has taken the Medan Zoo managers or the city mayor, to court.

Article 302 of the Criminal Code prescribes up to nine month’s imprisonment for anyone committing cruelty against animals, causing injury or death. The 2014 Animal Husbandry and Health Law says the central and regional governments are accountable and could face between one and three months of imprisonment for failing to protect animals.

Rather than taking responsibility for the tigers’ deaths, Mayor Bobby explained that the run-down zoo was due for renovation works scheduled to start this year. The zoo will be closed to the public during this period. He said several factors accounted for the deaths of the four tigers, but they included a lack of food, sickness and age. One of them was 19 years old.

The mayor said the city refused to inject money to save the zoo and instead was looking for private investors to fund the renovation, according to CNN Indonesia. But in the meantime, it appears that his decision has left the zoo financially bleeding.

This is not acceptable. Financial difficulty is a poor excuse for not saving the lives of these animals. Especially when the country is spending so much money on the coming elections.

Ambitious politicians are spending money like crazy to win over voters, and even President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, Bobby’s father-in-law, has been going around dispensing generous rice assistance to the poor. Surely it would not be asking too much for them to donate money to help the zoo’s finances. The zoo should have raised the alarm before the tigers started dying.

This really comes down to bad management and a lack of sensitivity on the part of the zoo managers. The declining number of visitors may have been used as an excuse during the COVID-19 pandemic, but now that it is long over, open entertainment places offer attractive alternative locations for families who are tired of visiting shopping malls.

Privatization is a good idea, and Ragunan Zoo in Jakarta has developed in the past decade into one of the best zoos in Southeast Asia. But until that happens, before it can secure new investors, the current Medan Zoo managers are responsible for the well-being of all the animals.

Indonesia needs stronger legislation to protect animals, whether held in captivity or not, in line with the 1978 Universal Declaration of Animal Welfare. Yes, like humans, animals have rights. The deaths of the tigers in Medan must touch our conscience.