Animal rights activists claimed responsibility for setting fire to several ticket booths at the Peaugres Safari park in the Ardèche region at the beginning of August.

According to The Local, the zoo had to close for August 2nd and burned most of the night of August 1st. A blog post on the animal rights group’s website describes their reasons why they set the fire and how they did it:

Zoos pretend to protect these animals, when in fact at the time they were discovered by colonialists, they were decimated and thrown into cages and brought back here to be exhibited as entertainment, as gifts in circuses and zoos.

Zoos remind us of those colonialists who didn’t just massacre and exile non-human animals but by using the same arguments that they had that “human zoos” which were developed during the bloody process of colonialisation.

Police are investigating and, hopefully, they perpetrators will be found soon and charged to the fullest extent of the law. But this isn’t just an abridgement of property rights but goes to show the nihilistic nature of the arsonists.

The anarchists who burned the ticket booths claimed zoos are like prisons and equated them with colonisation. Obliterating such distinctions also leads to other such irrational conclusions including equating animals as being on par with humans. It isn’t just irrational, but the mentality of people seeking to destroy, in this case humans and human institutions.