Kiriakou introduces the story as a way of filling time. He was in Addis Ababa with half a day and nothing to do, so he went to the zoo. [1]
What he saw
There were, in his account, three or four zoo workers pulling and pushing a screaming donkey into the lions’ cage. The animal was “doing everything it can to fight being pushed into the lion’s cage.” [2] The lions then tore it to pieces. [2]
Kiriakou’s own verdict is brief and unhedged: “It was bad.” He does not soften it, and when his co-host twice volunteered that he would have wanted to watch, Kiriakou did not join him. [2]
The context in which the story arises is a Danish zoo’s public appeal for unwanted pets to feed to its predators, which Kiriakou and Rall had been discussing with a mixture of horror and amusement. Kiriakou offers Addis Ababa as the harder version of the same thing — not a policy announcement but something he stood and watched. [1]
The admission price
The detail Kiriakou adds without prompting concerns the gate. “They gouge you if you’re a Westerner,” he says: roughly a nickel to get in as an Ethiopian, and about a dollar if you are not. [2]
Foreign zoos generally
Asked whether zoos elsewhere are like this, Kiriakou agrees that the ones in Central Asia and comparable places are rough and “not up to the high standards” — a judgement his co-host immediately relativised by pointing out that the Central Park Zoo in New York used to be awful too. Kiriakou’s reply was a single word of agreement. [3]
The episode is one of a small set of unglamorous travel recollections Kiriakou offers from his overseas career, told without a lesson attached.