The Telegraph 21 Mar 08;
The director of the world famous Berlin Zoo has been accused of overbreeding animals and selling the "spares" to be slaughtered and used in Chinese medicines.
Bernhard Blaszkiewitz is under pressure to quit following the criminal complaint by a leading Green politician that he allegedly illegally sold the animals for slaughter for profit.
He strenuously denies the allegations but they are now being considered by the Berlin public prosecutor who will decide on whether charges will follow.
A pygmy hippopotamus and a family of bears are cited among the animals that were allegedly traded to be killed. It was claimed they ended up at a Belgian slaughterhouse.
The allegations are a public relations disaster for the zoo following a huge rise in its profile over the past year with the celebrity of the polar bear Knut, the cub abandoned by its mother to be raised by human hand. Knut has turned the zoo into Berlin's biggest tourist attraction and earned it £6 million.
Claudia Haemmerling, a member of the Berlin parliament and an expert on animal rights, filed the criminal complaint which also includes further allegations that the zoo bred "bastard" cross-breeds of a panther and a Java leopard which were sold along with tigers and jaguars to China where they ended up on the shelves of traditional medicine stores marketed as "impotency cures."
"The pictures and the facts speak for themselves," she claimed "He must go."
According to the complaint, the alleged practice of surplus breeding and dubious sales goes back to the early 1990s. The surplus animals were allegedly bred at the Berlin Tierpark in the east of the capital, where Mr Blaszkiewitz is also director.
Following the allegations the German Animal Protection League has asked for a statement from the zoo about whether surplus rhinos and giraffes were sold to circuses in the region.
But it is the alleged slaughter of the creatures that has incensed Berliners.
Miss Haemmerling and the prominent German animal rights activist Frank Albrecht allege some were killed in an abattoir in the town of Wortel in Belgium.
According to a letter from a dealer in rare animals who bought the bears, they went to a zoo in Wortel, while an extract from a stud book purportedly shows that the hippo also ended up there.
"Wortel doesn't have a zoo," said Mr Albrecht. "However, it does have a slaughterhouse and we say that was where these animals were killed and shipped abroad."
The Wortel slaughterhouse allegedly featured in a separate story yesterday in Berlin's BZ newspaper which obtained a grainy video said to be of a tiger being butchered there.
Wolfgang Apel, president of the German Animal Protection League, has called for the cases to be cleared up quickly. "If there is clear proof that the animals ended up in a slaughterhouse, then Blaskiewitz will ultimately have to resign," he said.
Mr Blaszkiewitz categorically denied the allegations, calling them a mixture of "misunderstandings and nonsense."
He denied the zoo deliberately bred excess animals. "All offspring are planned," he added.
Regarding the bear family, Mr Blaszkiewitz said the three bears in question had been old animals which were donated to another reputable dealer in Germany. He said he did not know where the animals had gone after that and denied any knowledge of a connection to Wortel.
The big cats that went to China were sold to zoos with the permission of Germany's Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, he said, adding that claims that the animals had met with an untimely end were based on a "Eurocentric view" of China.
Mr Blaszkiewitz said he was the victim of a "smear campaign" and accused Miss Haemmerling, with whom he said he had had contact several times in the past, of making the accusations for political ends. Simone Herbeth of the public prosecutor's office confirmed that the complaint was being investigated.
According to Miss Herneth, selling zoo animals without sufficient reason is a crime under Germany's animal protection laws and is punishable by a fine or a jail sentence of up to three years.
