A donkey suffered “a long and harrowing death” after being pushed into a tiger enclosure at a Chinese zoo last week. A shareholder fed the live donkey, which resided at the zoo, to the tigers in an act of protest over a financial dispute with the zoo.

“This is a horrific way to treat an equine, and there is no defense for such a callous act,” said Roly Owers, chief executive officer of World Horse Welfare, an equine welfare charity in the United Kingdom. “Carnivores in zoos should be given a carcass or meat, and not a terrified, vulnerable donkey who endured a long and harrowing death. It is deeply disturbing that people would think this could be an acceptable form of protest.”

A statement from the Yancheng Safari Park, near Shanghai, indicated that an angry shareholder decided to take some of the farm animals (including donkeys, goats, and sheep) to sell them at a local market as a way to make up financial losses.

However, “the guards of the zoo did not let (the shareholder) go out from the zoo because the shareholder was in an economic dispute case, and he was not allowed to take any property of the zoo out in the current situation,” said Chunjiang Zhao, PhD, of the China Agricultural University College of Animal Science and Technology and Equine Center, in Beijing, and the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture’s Key Laboratory of Animal Breeding and Genetics