Sydney
There can be few zoos in the world with so favoured an aspect as Sydney's Taronga. Tucked into a wooded hillside on the city's North Shore, the zoo overlooks the harbour and the Opera House. Postcards and promotional literature show giraffes framed against the Harbour Bridge, so close it looks as though they could lick the iron girders with their long blue tongues. But all is not well at Australia's best-known zoo. In the past two years, 15 animals have died in Taronga's care.
Among them were some pretty big beasts, including two elephants, a zebra, an orang-utan, a scimitar-horned oryx and a dingo.
A few simply expired from old age, but in many cases the blame was ascribed to mysterious gastro-intestinal ailments or misadventure.
The latest casualty was a double tragedy - Kua, a four-year-old one-horned rhinoceros, was pregnant when she died last week.
The incident was something of an international embarrassment. Kua had been brought only last year from San Diego Zoo in the United States, and the birth of a one-horned rhino calf would have been a coup.