A month after an animal activist team discovered that two lionesses at the crumbling Karachi Zoo had been infected with potentially life-threatening blood parasites, they are yet to receive any treatment. It should be remembered that the now-deceased elephant Noor Jehan was the first animal at the zoo to undergo any medical examination at all. She might have never received it if not for the media attention. It hasn’t been a full month since Noor Jehan was winched out with a crane and lifted onto a mound of sand beneath the only tree in her enclosure-her final resting place. An elephant that should’ve been in her prime was instead flailing around, eyes filled with pain. Caged, starved, abused and exploited, the life of an animal in a Pakistani zoo is marked with distress and suffering. It is not uncommon to see children chipping off cobblestones to hurl at a crocodile huddled in a concrete pool while others throw chips at baboons in a tiny enclosure, gleefully watching them gobble them up. Some go as far as to poke the lions with sticks they’ve collected off the ground. A gorilla sits quietly in another cage, entirely alone. And the lionesses, once majestic, once alive, have lost all the flair that made them attractive to their visitors. Shockingly, the ponds in their enclosure have been empty for months and authorities expressed no inclination to fill them up again. Zoo’s administration remains indifferent-once they lost their mates, they also lost the zoo’s interest. Their well-being has never been of particular consequence to their caretakers-an admission that they might not be willing to make but is painfully clear to everyone else. But the reality of animal abuse in Pakistan reflects a broader mindset towards the downtrodden-asserting dominance over those who can’t speak for themselves is a normal part of life in Pakistan. Will things change in the foreseeable future? It’s hard to say but certainly not as quickly as they should. With neglect and abuse rampant at every conceivable level, Pakistan’s animals have many more tragedies written in their future unless we give serious thought to shutting down our zoos altogether. *