A camel appearing malnourished at a zoo in Abuja.
Nigeria stands accused of animal cruelty after a photo of a frail-looking camel surfaced online.
Tunde
Sawyerr, said he was visiting the National Children's Park and Zoo in
the capital city of Abuja when he spotted the animal.
"Before you put animals in a place,
there are certain things to do. If there was any animal that stood out
in terms of it being malnourished, and it not being taken care of, it
was the camel," CNN Reported.
The zoo's deputy director of wildlife, Aminu Muhammed, denied Sawyerr's allegation that the camel was malnourished.
"The
camel about some months ago was down with a heavy skin infection and
was very lean. So we had to collect a fecal sample, blood sample, and
equally even scrape some of the skin to determine which medicine we can
use to treat the skin disease and we had done that," as reported by CNN.
The visitor who went to the zoo with his three-year-old daughter, said his daughter was unable to identify the camel.
"She
knows what a camel looks like on TV, a deer, a donkey, and a monkey,"
he said. "She was able to recognize all of them apart from the camel."
He
posted the picture of the animal on Twitter with the caption "saw this
former camel at the Abuja zoo." The post quickly went viral.
The zoo's deputy director Muhammed said
that the heavy rains affected the camel's health but the zoo has given
the animal adequate medical attention.
"The
camel is an albino camel. They are desert animals and it's just a young
one, so it's just trying to acclimatize that's why it comes down with
that (skin infection)," Muhammed said, adding that animals at the zoo
undergo regular checkup every three months.
He, however, admitted that the park needed more funds to take care of the animals.