Lion mauls young girl
2004-05-06 07:13
Beijing - A 10-year-old girl was seriously injured after being mauled by a lion cub at a Chinese wildlife park that allows visitors to walk among the animals, state media said Thursday.
The girl, named Yuanyuan, was with her mother and at least 20 others who entered an area of the Wuhan Forest Wildlife Park which is open to tourists but has no barriers to separate them from the lions, Xinhua news agency said.
"We were walking in the middle of the crowd and two lions were lying on our left and a younger one was on our right," the girl's mother Cao Hong was quoted as saying.
They had walked a few hundred paces when the lion cub suddenly pounced on the girl, slapping its paws on her shoulder.
"I yelled at it, carried Yuanyuan in my arms and tried to run away with her. But the lion grasped her so tightly that we could not get away," Cao said.
Staff members rushed to the scene and hit the lion on the head with a club. It then loosened its grasp of the girl's shoulder but instead latched on to her left calf.
She was eventually freed and rushed to hospital where she needed 50 stitches to wounds on her back, waist and right calf, Xinhua said.
The lion cub was tame, fed and had never attacked before, said Dai Li, manager of the lions' open area.
It was not the first lion attack at the park. Last year, a 24-year-old zoo keeper was killed by two lionesses.
Safety standards are lax at China's many animal parks, where visitors have occasionally been mauled through bus windows, when throwing live food, such as chickens, at the parks' carnivores.