About 60 animals are missing and nine birds have been slaughtered after a violent break-in to the Tasmania Zoo on Thursday or early Friday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Saturday.
"They've gone on a rampage," the zoo co-owner, Rochelle Penney, told the daily. "They have gone in there with the purpose of harming the animals."
According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, vandals cut the locks on several cages with birds, kangaroos, quolls and monkeys, released the animals and smashed in nine birds.
The zoo owner Dick Warren told the ABC TV channel that when he had come to work, he found “door, after door, after door open and all the locks had been cut, with birds missing and birds dead.”
"Either they have just caught them and banged their heads or pulled their heads off, it's a pretty sick thing to see," Warren told the TV channel.
The rampage may become a devastating blow for the zoo which is a part of the Australian national program on protecting the endangered species, the Sydney Morning Herald said.
The zoo keeper, Courtney McMahon, told the ABC that Tasmanian devils, which are almost extinct in the wild because of the contagious facial tumor, were not harmed.
"The way that the birds were released, if these devils were released like that it would be a death sentence to them," McMahon told the TV channel.
