Our zoos are becoming a death trap for the wildlife. This week, a lioness breathed her last at a lion breeding sanctuary in Kasur. If this was not enough to open the eyes of the vets concerned, a lion, which was also ill, also died. Officials from the Ministry of Climate Change say the lion pair died while being transported to the sanctuary in Kasur from the Islamabad zoo. The footage doing the rounds online shows where handles are seen poking the lion with sticks to force it out of its cage. When the lion remained firm, the handlers lit fires to smoke it out and into special fabricated cages. The autopsy of the bodies will ascertain the real cause of the death of the pair, some ministry officials, however, blamed the shifting of animals during extreme weather conditions as the real cause of the death. The transportation of animals from different zoos to other places, such as the sanctuaries, is proving fatal for wildlife. Earlier, ostriches, a hog deer and pheasants have also died while being moved to sanctuaries. The ministry, which maintains that the Islamabad High Court has tasked the Islamabad Wildlife Management Board with shifting zoo animals to wildlife sanctuaries safely, should look into the expertise of the Wildlife Management Board. Wildlife protecting body, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Pakistan, has criticized the poor handling of the lions at the zoo and expressed “grave” concerns over videos circulating on social media. Calling it “absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable to treat any animal this way”, the WWF-Pakistan “expressed its disappointment to the IWMB and hopes that those who are responsible will be brought to justice for this repulsive act. In the wake of this incident, as a protest, WWF-Pakistan has also stepped down from the board of the IWMB, of which it has been a member for several years”. Not only zoo animals, Pakistan has been hostile to migratory birds, such as houbara bustards which are killed in our part of the world under official patronage. The federal government has granted death sentence permits to King of several royal people of the Gulf to hunt for pleasure the internationally-protected houbara bustard in the hunting season. Over the years, the number of migratory birds has declined due to ruthless killing, mainly by the royal families of the Gulf, despite the outcry of nature and wildlife protection activists. The flocks of birds fly from the colder central Asian region every year southwards to winter in Pakistan because of its relatively warm environment here. *