They have since successfully worked with the owner to close the zoo and find homes for the animals.įor Omega, home will be a sanctuary in Sao Paolo, Brazil where he is to be flown later Monday aboard an Emirates airlines flight. Lebanon, Iraq and Bahrain are the only Arab countries yet to sign the convention.Ĭhimpanzees and other highly endangered wildlife are regularly smuggled to the Middle East to be displayed in private zoos, hotels and for the pet trade.Īnimals Lebanon heard about the zoo in Ansar, near the market town of Nabatiyeh, about six months ago. After he grew stronger, he was locked up and taken to a zoo where for the past 10 years he has lived in a cage measuring 430 square feet (40 square meters).Īnimals Lebanon has been pushing for Lebanon to join the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, and adopt laws that regulate the importation of primates. In his younger years, Omega was used in one of the local restaurants to entertain people and was made to smoke cigarettes and serve water pipes to customers.
Organizers of Omega’s evacuation say it marks the first time a chimpanzee has been rescued in Lebanon, a country with virtually no animal rights protection laws. if someone will throw him a cigarette he’d pick it up and go for it straight away,” said Jason Meier, executive director for animal rights group Animals Lebanon. But he often puffed cigarettes that zoo visitors threw in his cage. 2 She is able to light her own cigarettes using a lighter and has also learned to light a cigarette by touching it to the end of a lit cigarette. The footage, captured by a tourist at the Tienshan wild animal zoo in Xinjiang earlier this month, shows Jiaku the 20-year-old chimp puffing on a cigarette in front of a crowd of onlookers. Smoking Azalea smokes about one pack of cigarettes a day, 1 though she reportedly does not inhale when smoking. Omega, who weighs around 132 pounds (60 kilograms), has never climbed a tree or seen other chimpanzees. A shocking video has emerged of a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette at a zoo in China.
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