Plan to slaughter crocodiles in Czech farm

May 28, 2011 04:07 pm | Updated October 18, 2016 02:06 pm IST - VELKY KARLOV Czech Republic

The plan was to transform the crocodile farm into a park that would offer the general public a wide variety of animals to see, two restaurants to dine at and a pond to go fishing in. But with finances not working out, the owner has another plan- slaughter 100 of the farm’s 215 Nile crocodiles and make money selling their exotic meat and valuable skin.

Killing protected animals such as crocodiles is currently illegal in the Czech Republic and elsewhere in Europe, but the nation’s Ministry of Agriculture is drafting a regulation that would make it possible. This has outraged some people, including animal rights experts, and even some crocodile farm owners.

“We strictly reject the legislation,” said Eva Hodek, director of the Prague-based Foundation for Protection of Animals. “There’s no reason to allow only one country in the EU to slaughter crocodiles.” Hodek said butchers in the country have no experience killing such animals, meaning they would suffer terribly and added that activists suspect the current owners of the farm, who have operated it since February, planned on the slaughter of crocodiles from the start. “That must have been the real business plan,” she said.

Magdalena Dvorackova, the spokeswoman for the Czech Republic’s agriculture ministry, said the regulation change regarding crocodiles is needed and that a similar move in the past allowed farmers to slaughter another exotic animal, the ostrich. However, these Nile crocodiles are not listed as an endangered species in the republic, but animal rights groups say it should not be put in the same category as domestic animals such as pigs, sheep or cows, which farmers raise and legally slaughter. “It’s time for a change,” Dvorackova said in an interview. “The crocodiles have grown enough to be slaughtered.”

The current director of the crocodile farm, which was opened in south-eastern Czech Republic in 2004, looks forward to such a change. “We are waiting for the ministry’s decision that would allow us to cut their number,” Antonin Kyjovsky said regarding the farm’s imported crocodiles. “We just can’t afford to keep them all anymore.” He added that he expected to have no trouble selling the crocodile meat to restaurants in cities such as Prague and crocodile skin to the makers of products such as belts and shoes.

But opponents of such a regulation change also include some crocodile farmers. Miroslav Prochazka, director of the oldest Czech crocodile farm, located in Chvalsiny, and a crocodile zoo in Protivin, said he doesn’t want to kill a single one of his collection of 110 crocodiles. He said they include 21 of the 23 existing kinds of crocodiles. At Velky Karlov, a village in south-eastern Czech Republic, crocodile keeper Lubomir Rozkot said, “They have a fascinating body and look. They are the top predators who haven’t changed for 65 millions years.”

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