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Two African lions that were rescued from a Ukrainian animal sanctuary earlier in March have found a new home at a Belgian animal shelter.
Tsar and Jamil, age 1, arrived at the nonprofit Natural Help Center (Natuurhulpcentrum) in Opglabbeek, Belgium, on Wednesday, March 9, according to Reuters.
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The twin male lions made it to the shelter after their initial evacuation from the Wild Animal Rescue in Kyiv led them to the Zoo Poznań in Poland, on Feb. 26 – two days after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine.
Tsar and Jamil (not pictured) are twin lions that got evacuated from the Wild Animal Rescue in Kyiv earlier this month. The big cats now call Belgium home. (iStock)
Tsar and Jamil were born in January 2021 and are considered “still very young,” wrote Frederik Thoelen, the shelter’s on-staff biologist, in an email to Fox News Digital.
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“They are small for their age because of the very bad malnutrition at the house where they were confiscated last year before going to the rescue center in Kyiv,” he continued.
The sub-adult lions were loaded into a truck and their journey to Poland reportedly took five days.
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Thoelen told Reuters that the volunteers who transported the two big cats were stopped by Russian forces along the way.
“The Russian army, they pointed their guns at the carers,” Thoelen told the news agency. “They threatened to kill the animals. The carers said ‘no those are our animals. If you touch the animals you first have to touch us.'”
Tsar and Jamil spent nearly two weeks in Poznań, Poland, before they were transported once more, according to Facebook posts shared by the Natural Help Center.
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The two cats left Poland on Tuesday, March 8, and had a brief pit stop in Germany.
Tsar and Jamil are currently situated in the Natural Help Center’s quarantine ward, where the animals will spend three months.
The Natural Help Center is partnered with animal sanctuaries around the globe, including the Panthera Africa Big Cat Sanctuary in Stanford, South Africa, which will be taking in other rescued wildlife from the Belgian shelter.
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It has yet to be determined where Tsar and Jamil will end up next.
Four other lions were evacuated from Kyiv alongside six tigers, two caracals and an African wild dog.
Source: www.foxnews.com