See How Zoo Animals Are Coping with the Heat

Aug. 11, 2003 — While Europe's human population turns up the air conditioning, the continent's farm animals are simply getting cooked in the prolonged heat wave while zookeepers deploy imaginative countermeasures.

As temperatures soar, tens of thousands of farm animals have already died in overheated sheds, barns and coops throughout the continent, while zoo animals are enjoying a chilled summer diet.

Southern European zookeepers have taken to giving their animals low-fat, low-energy diets in the hope of protecting them from overheating.

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With temperatures of 40°C (104°F) in the shade in Madrid, the zoo now serves food in blocks of ice and provides animals with showers. There's even a special mud pool for the rhinoceros.

Monkeys at the zoo in Rome are being fed frozen yogurt and fruit, which they are "licking like children" according to their keeper, Fulvio Fraticelli.

But the lot of farm animals is much worse, with forecasters predicting at least another week of sweltering weather, which has sent records tumbling from Paris to Pisa.

A major chicken producer in the Burgundy region southeast of Paris said 60,000 birds had died this week in the heat. "The heat is still on but luckily the death rate is going down because they are getting used to it," said Michel Delagneau of Ducs de Bourgogne farms.

Elsewhere panicked farmers are calling in the fire brigade to hose down animals' sheds or even the beasts themselves.

Nevertheless, with temperatures reaching 50°C (122°F) inside the buildings, which are often made of corrugated metal, the survival rate for poultry is low.

"Losses depend on the state of advancement of the animal's fattening," said French regional farmers union director, Jean Dube.

"If they're fat, they become denser and the heat is all the more unbearable for the animals."

In the Netherlands, one farm reported 1,400 dead ducks, with firemen called in to hose down the survivors.

Pigs are also hard hit. In France's western Loire region 26,000 pigs and piglets have so far expired in the heat, overloading local vets who must dispose of the carcasses.

Meanwhile, fish farms in northern Serbia reported that three tons of carp had so far died because of low water levels, while Swiss fishery officials have been transporting fish from drying, oxygen-starved river beds to fresher waters further up the mountain.

In Germany's Lake Constance and Rhine River, eels are dying because of diminished oxygen levels in the warmer waters, with trout and salmon also threatened.

But the heat wave is not all bad news for the continent's biodiversity.

Lower water levels in rivers mean easy pickings for hungry birds, although the early ripening of fruit in an overdose of sunshine means there will be less energy-giving sugar available for birds to eat on their forthcoming migration to Africa.