Amsterdam zoo Artis offers up lions amid coronavirus dollars crunch

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Amsterdam’s zoo Artis, one of the oldest animal parks in Europe, reported on Thursday it will halt maintaining lions for the reason that it just cannot afford to pay for them because of to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

“This was a complicated determination because the lions are element of Artis’s identification,” director Rembrandt Sutorius said in a statement.

Park attendance was down by 50% in 2020 and it is now closed to the public solely, with preset expenses of 60,000 euros per working day and an gathered price range shortfall of 20 million euros, Sutorius claimed in a statement.

Artis’s two lionesses and a person lion will now journey as a team in mid-February to a zoo in France the place they will have additional room than they experienced savored in Amsterdam.

The park claimed there was no possibility the very same lions would return after the pandemic ends, but it did not completely rule out the return of lions to the zoo in the upcoming.

The concrete lion enclosure at Artis, thought of cutting-edge when it was built in 1927 mainly because it relied on a moat and wall, instead than bars, to keep the animals contained, had been scheduled for a 4 million euro rebuild just before the virus crisis started past yr.

Artis has retained lions considering that 1839, a 12 months right after it 1st opened to the public.