Indian Writing

Twenty-one lions dying slowly in a Chandigarh zoo, victims of an experiment that went terribly wrong:

In the 1980s officials at the Chhatbir Zoo in Chandigarh, bred captive Asiatic lions with a pair of African circus animals, resulting in a hybrid species.

Within a few years it became obvious it had not worked.

The offspring found it hard to walk, let alone run, because their hind legs were weak. And by the mid 1990s the big cats — which live for up to 20 years in captivity — showed symptoms of failing immune systems.

But it wasn’t until 2000 that the breeding programme was ended, and the male lions given vasectomies, by which time the zoo had 70 to 80 such lions. Their number dwindled slowly, with disease killing some and some dying of wounds inflicted by other lions…

(Thanks, Sonia Hill, for emailing me about this report)

Babykillers at this Punjab abortion clinic used to dump the unwanted female foetuses into a pit:

Manual labourer Gulzar Singh is haunted by the day he exhumed baby foetuses from a pit outside an abortion clinic in one of the grisliest chapters in India’s fight against female feticide.

“Inside the well I found bones. Small ones. Little, little ones. There were some baby skulls too,” recalled Singh with a shudder.

Singh was ordered by police in early August to dig up pits on the grounds of a private hospital in Pattran, a small town in Punjab, which was suspected of operating an illegal abortion clinic….

Tethered to the end of a rope held by three of his friends, Singh was lowered towards the gruesome find but almost immediately shouted to be brought out.

“The smell was very foul,” he said. “Exhaust fans were used to blow out the toxic gases before I went in again.”

For the next several hours, Singh sent up buckets full of human remains, blood-stained gauzes and bandages, empty bottles of abortion-inducing medicines…