A crocodile swimming down a city street. A bear hugging an air conditioner outside a second-floor apartment window. A hippo loitering outside a Swatch store. Penguins drowned. And a young white lion dead from a police bullet to the head. Those are images from Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, where flash floods last weekend killed 12 people and devastated the local zoo.
The elements will sometimes do worse things to a city. One has to wonder, though, what the lion, the penguins and the apes (all among the 300 zoo animals that perished in the floods) were doing in cages and fenced-off enclosures in a narrow valley in the middle of a city — as defenseless in the flood as prison inmates would have been.
Zoos these days say their goals are conservation and biological research, but they are really the same inhumane menageries that existed 100 and 200 years ago. The Tbilisi tragedy should make governments reconsider the rules for keeping wild animals in captivity.