Horrified visitors to the Beekse Bergen Safari Park in Amsterdam watched as three Sloth bears captured, mauled and then devoured a Barbary macaque during the zoo's opening hours on Sunday.
The Associated Press reports that the bears chased the large monkey into an electric fence, where it was initially stunned but recovered enough to flee inside a wooden structure. One of the Sloth bears chased the doomed Barbary macaque into that structure where it mauled it to death and then the three bears ate it--in full view of the shocked visitors. The Beekse Bergen Safari Park confirmed the killing. "In an area where Sloth bears, great apes and Barbary macaques have coexisted peacefully for a long time, the harmony was temporarily disturbed during opening hours on Sunday," the Dutch zoo said in an official statement to the media. "Of course the habitats here in the safari park are arranged in such a way that one animal almost never kills another, but they are and remain wild animals."
Marco Berelds, one of the zoo visitors who witnessed the attack, posted a detailed report on the Web complete with photographs. He noted that once the monkey had fled to the structure, which was built of crossing horizontal and vertical poles, zookeepers tried to distract the bear. They failed. Instead, the bear climbed onto one of the horizontal poles and then "used its sharp canines to pull the macaque, which was shrieking and resisting, from its perch," wrote Berelds. It was then eaten by the three Sloth bears. The zoo said it will move the Barbary macaques to another part of the park, reports AP.
Monkey, the other white meat.