DPA/Mumbai
Shiva, one-horned rhino and star of Mumbai’s Byculla Zoo, seems to prefer the city to the two prospective female companions waiting for him at New Delhi’s National Zoological Park, a news report said yesterday.
Shiva has spent 28 solitary years at Byculla Zoo. He was brought to the zoo in 1985 when he was six years old from Assam where the animals are found in the wild.
The Bombay High Court ruled in 2005 that Shiva should not be kept without a female companion and ordered the zoo authorities and the Mumbai municipal corporation to find him a partner.
Now that the companions have been found, Shiva refuses to go.
“The cage was attached to his feeding room early (Wednesday) morning,” Byculla Zoo director Anil Anjankar was quoted as saying by the Mumbai Mirror.
“We drew him inside the feeding room with bananas and carrot leaves, his favourite, and left the food in the cage. But he simply wouldn’t enter the cage.”
Zoo staff also tried to force him into the transit cage by partly draining his pool, which he spends hours in, but Shiva would still not enter.
Tranquilising Shiva for the journey is not an option, the officials said because it was a three-day journey to the Indian capital by truck and he could turn violent when he woke along the way.
The zoo officials said they would keep trying to persuade Shiva to leave his enclosure.
