MATT WEINKAM’s AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF ANIMALS KILLED IN THE 21ST CENTURY:
A giraffe at the Copenhagen zoo named Marius who was deemed genetically unfit for reproduction, and a giant red stag in Britain called The Exmoor Emperor who was shot in 2010 during mating season, and a flamingo called Greater in Australia who was beaten by four teenagers in 2008 and euthanized in 2014 after it began showing signs of arthritis, and a killer whale, Luna, who was pulled into the blades of a tugboat while swimming off the coast of Vancouver Island, and one of Kenya’s largest African Elephants, Satao, whose tusks were so long they almost touched the ground but was shot with a poison arrow by poachers, and a bull called Shambo living in a Hindu temple in Wales who tested positive for TB and was slaughtered by court ruling despite the monks’ many protests, and a cat that wandered the business district in Leiden, The Netherlands, who went by many names including Danger Cat, Chardonnay, Prinsje, Roof Cat, Sweetheart, Jacco, and Buurtpoes Bledder who was struck by an unknown motorist overnight in 2013, and a New Zealand dolphin, Moko, who lead two trapped sperm whales to rescue in 2008 but was found dead two years later on a beach, his body scarred by boats, and a brown throated sloth that emerged from a cave in Panama and was beaten to death with rocks and sticks by five teenage boys and who was later found hairless and half-alien from underwater decomposition leading to cryptozoological speculation and names such as the Panama Monster, the Panama ET, and the Blue Hill Horror, and a chimpanzee named Travis who had appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola and Old Navy as well as several television shows and who was shot by a police officer after he attacked his owner’s friend, blinding her and mauling her so badly she lost her hands, ears, lips, and eyesight, and a brown fur seal called Gaston who escaped from the Prague Zoo in 2002 when the Vltava River flooded his tank and allowed him to swim away from human beings until he died two hundred miles downriver from infection and exhaustion, and a crocodile found by a fisherman on the banks of the Parismina River in Costa Rica near-dead, shot through the eye, a skinny 150 pounds, until the fisherman took him home and fed him chicken and fish and medicine and named him Pocho and kept Pocho in his house, hugging him, kissing his snout, miming how to chew so that Pocho did not die, was not killed but made well, and when the fisherman tried to return Pocho to the wild Pocho followed him back to the swamps behind his house and refused to leave until finally the fisherman acquired the proper permits to keep Pocho safe for twenty years without incident until Pocho finally died of natural causes.
