Polar bear dies after eating coat and bag

The German polar bear died yesterday after eating the bag and jacket, which had been dropped in his enclosure, in the Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart.Anton had been sick for several days before staff saw him coughing up pieces of fabric.They administered a drug to make him vomit, which was successful in making him produce more pieces of the coat and bag, but it was too late to save him.This is the latest in an unfortunate series of deaths in the zoo which were the result of animals eating foreign objects in their enclosures.Egon, a hippopotamus, died after swallowing a tennis ball and Charly, the last elephant seal in the zoo, died after swallowing a teddy bear.The polar bear died of severe internal injuries and inflammation, and could have lived another 10 to 15 years if he had not eaten the garments.Zookeeper Andreas Woessner said he did not know why Anton decided to eat the coat and bag.‘Usually he just ripped up things that fell into his enclosure, I don't know why he decided to eat this object, and can only assume there must have been something very tasty in there,’ he said.Zoo staff say that visitors dropping objects into enclosures was a serious problem.They estimate that in the last 20 years, 200 children’s shoes, 50 babies’ dummies, countless hats, cameras and phones, as well as several pairs of glasses have ended up in the water of the polar bear enclosure.Vet Tobias Knauf-Witzens appealed to visitors to inform zoo staff if they dropped something in an enclosure.‘If we had known that something was in the enclosure, we might have been able to save Anton,’ he said.Anton’s death, which comes just days after a two-year-old giraffe was publicly killed and fed to lions in Copenhagen Zoo, is sadly reminiscent of the death of world-famous Knut the polar bear a few years ago. Knut was born in captivity and hand-reared by zoo staff after he was rejected by his mother.The polar bear was much loved by the German public, but suddenly collapsed and died in his enclosure in front of 600 visitors at Berlin Zoo in 2011.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az