Motion to Agriculture minister over Zoo problems

CAIRO – 1 August 2018: Parliamentarian Magdi Malek submitted a motion Wednesday to the Parliament’s Speaker Ali Abdel Aal to question the Minister of Agriculture over withdrawing the Giza Zoo from the International Federation Classification.

“The zoo has been a landmark for all Egyptians of the past 50 years, but due to the extreme negligence of officials and those responsible, it has become unsustainable,” Malek said.

Malek also told Egypt Today that the government should call the officials responsible for the zoo to identify the problems to resolve in order for the zoo to regain its position in this classification and to keep it from collapsing.

A few days ago, Egyptian student Mahmoud Sarhan, 18, was visiting the zoo and took photos of the odd-looking zebra and shared them on Facebook, rendering them viral.

In a clear photo of the animal, it appears that the animal has long floppy ears instead of the more rounded ears of a zebra.

“From the first glance I knew that it was a donkey, not a zebra, as I'm an artist – I know the shape of a donkey and I know the shape of zebras, so it was easy to know," Sarhan told local news site Extranews.tv.

Though Mohamed Sultan, the zoo’s director, denied that the animal was a donkey, all animal experts asserted that this is not what a zebra looks like.

The Giza Zoo is the biggest animal park in the Middle East, and it was opened to the public in 1891 during the rule of Khedive Tawfiq. Many kinds of rare and endangered animals and birds live in the park and have successfully bred there.