Search Here

One pair of pants can lead to an otter's death!

That is what the Calgary Zoo's investigation team discovered, when it went into the Feb. 11 demise of an otter called Logan. He died after he got "fatally entangled" in a pair of pants that he had been given to play with.

Colleen Baird, the general curator, did not reveal how the pants became part of its playthings. She put it down to "human error."

"It's irrelevant how exactly the pants got in there, it's more that the pants got in there in the first place... We take animal deaths very seriously," said Baird, according to the Calgary Herald.

It was indeed an "unacceptable" error, according to the Canadian zoo, as the pants were an "unauthorized enrichment item," said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In the zoo, the animals are given toys to "problem solve, play, experience new tastes [and] keep them mentally enriched," even as every animal has its list of items that keepers should stick to, say the Calgary Zoo keepers on Facebook.

Worryingly, this is the latest death in the list of animals who have died through the years, says CNN. Earlier, a penguin died after it ate a stick. In 2008, almost all stingrays put into a new exhibit were suffocated due to poor water quality and in 1999, a polar bear called Misty died after being prescribed Prozac.

The Calgary Zoo called its animal care protocols as "the most stringent in the industry" and confirmed that staff members who had led to Logan's accident "have been disciplined but not fired". Moreover, training on the animal protocols will be given to the whole staff "to prevent an incident like this from ever happening again."