A female giraffe died due to accidental strangulation in Assam State Zoo in Guwahati on December 23 night.
Assam State Zoo’s divisional forest officer in-charge Ashwini Kumar said that the preliminary inquiry has suggested that it is an accidental death and an inquiry has been initiated into the incident.
“The preliminary inquiry has suggested that the giraffe died due to accidental strangulation. But the actual facts will come in the post-mortem report. The post-mortem has been completed and we are waiting for the post-mortem report,” Ashwini Kumar said.
The female giraffe named Anny was transported to the Assam State Zoo from Patna in 2019 under an animal exchange programme.
A group of animal lovers on December 26 staged a protest demanding an independent probe into the circumstances leading to the death of the female giraffe.
Rajkumar Baishya, an animal lover and the general secretary of Siriakhana Suraksha Mancha, a forum that raises its voice for the protection of zoo animals, said: “This is not the first time an animal has died in the zoo under mysterious circumstances. Nearly 1,200 animals have died in the zoo since 2017. Every time the zoo authority has given some strange statements. We suspect them of concealing facts.”
He, therefore, demanded the state zoo authority to make the CCTV footage public so that people get to know how the giraffe had died inside the zoo.
