(Madrid) Six lions, tigers and other felines evacuated from Ukraine have arrived at animal shelters in Spain and Belgium after a perilous truck journey in which the vehicle ran into Russian tanks and had to avoid the bombed areas, indicated the associations which collected them.
Posted at 1:32 p.m.
The lions, along with six tigers, two other big cats and a wild dog, arrived at a zoo in Poland last week from an animal sanctuary near Kyiv after a two-day journey bypassing areas of war.
Four lions and a wild dog were collected on Wednesday in Alicante in eastern Spain by a center run by the Dutch animal welfare association AAP, the organization said in a statement.
The lions were living in a shelter near Kyiv after being rescued, having previously suffered “horrible” living conditions. One of them, called Gyz, was locked up in “a small cage in a mall”.
Another lion, Flori, was confined as a pet to a small apartment where he was fed cat food while another, Nila, was rescued after living locked up in a nightclub where he was responsible for “entertaining consumers”.
“It will be a challenge to improve their fragile health, little by little, through proper diet, exercise and rest,” the association added.
Two other lions named Tsar and Jamil were taken care of on Wednesday by the Natuurhulpcentrum center located in the province of Limburg in eastern Belgium, the association said on Facebook.
The animals will remain in quarantine for three months.
The other animals, six tigers and two big cats, have so far remained at the zoo in Poznan in western Poland.
The truck which traveled nearly 1,000 km to the Polish border found itself in a place facing Russian tanks and had to bypass the Zhitomir region (western Ukraine) bombarded by Russian forces, said a spokesperson for the zoological park.
At the border, the animals were transferred to a Polish truck while the Ukrainian driver returned home to find his children.