Levels of poverty in Venezuela have become so acute that workers at a zoo are slaughtering animals to feed others, staff have told the AFP news agency.

They say that two emaciated pumas are serving as 'poster kids' of sorts for the distressing state of affairs.

The bone-thin pumas were saved from poachers, but recent photos of them published in the Panorama newspaper have shocked people across what was once an oil-rich country but is now saddled by hyperinflation and acute food and medicine shortages - largely as a result of lower petroleum prices.

Scroll down for video

A starving cougar is pictured in its cage at the Metropolitan Zoo in Maracaibo, Zulia State, Venezuela, on February 14, 2018

Critics say the plight of the animals is a reflection of Venezuela's descent into economic chaos

The town of San Francisco is near Venezuela's border with Colombia

The big cats were skinny when they first arrived at the zoo in the town of San Francisco in Zulia state near the Colombian border.

They initially got better, but as Venezuela's latest crisis started to take effect 'it is as if they shrank', one zoo worker said.

A male and a female Andean condor, born in captivity and brought to the park as part of a breeding program to save the endangered species, have gone weeks without being fed properly.

Two birds of prey were so hungry they cannibalized a cage mate, staff said, while a Bengal tiger an elderly lion have also lost weight.

[Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro] promised Venezuelans paradise, but given them hell'

To get around the lack of meat, zoo officials started hunting iguanas, which run wild in the zoo, and fishing tilapia from lagoons in the facility.

The zoo has also been hit by a series of thefts since the country descended into economic chaos. In 2016, at least 40 animals including a tapir were stolen - it is thought by people looking to salvage meat.

The minimum wage, equivalent to £40 a month at the official exchange rate, is barely enough to buy 4.5 pounds of meat.

In 2016 at the Caricuao Zoo in Caracas, a horse was killed by assailants who salvaged its flesh to eat. In the state of Falcon, two wild pigs were stolen from a zoo.

Peacocks and other birds have also been stolen from Bararida Zoo in Barquisimeto, 155 miles southwest of Caracas, said Carlos Silva, a veterinarian who has worked there for 13 years.

It is not just animal in zoos that are suffering. Large numbers of people are abandoning their pet dogs in cities of the country because they are unable to feed and vaccinate them, newspaper reports say.

Most of the dogs are starving and taking over garbage-lined street corners, blocking Venezuelans who scavenge for their own food there, El Nacional (in Spanish) reported.

Stray dogs are not a new a problem in major cities of the country, with reports from two years ago suggesting that the nation's poorest have always hunted and eaten them.

Stray dogs are being increasingly eaten by famished Venezuelans

Four years of recession and the world's highest inflation have plunged millions of Venezuelans into poverty. The authoritarian socialist regime of President Maduro (pictured) saw off mounting unrest last summer

Supermarket shelves in the capital Caracas have no food as Venezuela's economy sinks into the abyss

But in January, a non-governmental organization found that more and more Venezuelans, unable to afford anything else, were buying dog food to feed their families.

El Nacional cites a local NGO, the Canine Support Network (RAC), as finding a sharp increase in the number of pet abandonments documented over the last two years.

'Unfortunately, we see ourselves immersed in this difficult economic crossroads and there are people who, perhaps against their will, see themselves in the difficult situation of abandoning their pet,' Moises Gonzalez, who helps direct the group's spay and neuter efforts, told the newspaper.

'I would say we found a 100 percent increase in the number of people who write to us because they can no longer have their pets because they are leaving the country or they don't have the resources [to feed it].'

The situation is reported to be especially dire for prisoners in the country who have resorted to eating rats and pigeons to avoid starving to death.

Looting has been increasing in the provinces since Christmas, with food shortages and hyperinflation leaving millions of people hungry, though the capital, Caracas, has mostly lbeen unaffected. Pictured: Men appearing to loot a petrol tanker elsewhere in Venezuela

Dozens of men were filmed earlier this year shouting 'we are hungry' and 'people are suffering' as they surround a cow in a field (pictured) and stoned it in their desperate quest for food

There has been a huge exodus of people from Venezuela in recent months, on a par with mass migration from Syria

Inmate Alejandro Manuel Mago Coraspe, 41, was reported recently by local media to need urgent hospital treatment for food poisoning after eating dead rats he found in the garbage.

'We cooked them, but they were still raw,' he said, according to El Nuevo Herald. 'We ate them anyway. I think they were poisonous and that's why I fell ill. I normally kill them myself.' According to a medical report, the bones and cartilage of the rats 'obstructured his intestine', forcing the severely malnourished prisoner to undergo immediate surgery.

Stories of degradation and deprivation come out of Venezuela at a 'relentless clip'. The Washington Post recently reported.

The plight of people living in the poorer neighbourhoods of Caracas has significantly worsened in recent months

Many Venezuelans are now in a battle for survival

Life has seldom been so challenging for people living in shanty towns

'There are lurid tales of prison inmates foraging for dead rats, pumas and lions wasting away in Venezuelan zoos, and mothers embarking on harrowing cross-border trips just to find medicine for their children,' the newspaper said.

The country's tragic implosion means there is a lack of contraceptives and drugs, HIV patients are flooding hospitals and AIDS-related deaths have surged.

Destitute parents, starved and unable to cope, are abandoning their children at orphanages; mismanagement and graft turned one of the world's most oil-rich countries into a gasoline importer whose economy is at the edge of an abyss.

It is estimated that as many as four million Venezuelans - more than 10 percent of the population - have left the country. That is an exodus on a similar scale to that of war-torn in Syria.

U.N. statistics show that since November, more than 600,000 Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, 5,000 to the Caribbean isle of Curacao, 20,000 to Aruba, 30,000 to Brazil and 40,000 to Trinidad and Tobago.

The opposition for its part is weak and divided. On Tuesday a former state governor who said he would stand against President Maduro in April's elections was expelled from the Democratic Unity opposition coalition which is boycotting the vote.

It said Henri Falcon was erroneously endorsing a fraudulent electoral system. But Mr Falcon has defended his decision, saying he wanted to defeat a government that had 'promised Venezuelans paradise, but given them hell'.

Meanwhile the Trump administration is considering sanctioning a Venezuelan military-run oil services company and restricting insurance coverage for Venezuelan oil shipments to ratchet up pressure on Socialist President Nicolas Maduro, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.

With Maduro running for another term in an April election that Washington and its allies oppose as a sham, the U.S. is weighing sanctions that would target Venezuela's vital oil sector beyond what has been done before, the official told Reuters. Some measures could come before the vote and others could be imposed afterwards.

The official, who is close to U.S. internal deliberations on Venezuela policy and spoke on condition of anonymity, would not rule out an eventual full-scale ban on Venezuelan oil shipments to the U.S. - among the toughest of oil-related sanctions.

Large demonstrations in Venezuela last year against Maduro's increasingly authoritarian government were stifled by the authorities which replaced the opposition-filled Congress with a new Constituent Assembly stacked with presidential loyalists.

The body deployed sweeping powers to cow dissent and paved the way for April's elections, The Washington Post said. But all of these measures have been rejected by most of the international community, which views any election in the current climate of intimidation as a fraudulent farce.