A video showing protesters feeding a live donkey to tigers at a Chinese zoo is going viral.

The disturbance occurred Monday at Yancheng Safari Park in Jiangsu, just outside Shanghai. The clip, released on Chinese social media, shows protesters shoving the donkey into a moat, where two tigers pounce on the helpless animal. The donkey died 30 minutes later, The Guardian reported.

According to the BBC, this was an act of defiance by the zoo’s shareholders, who say they’re being cheated out of their investments. A statement on the zoo’s blog says the conflict arose after the zoo’s assets were frozen in a court case, which prevented the park from selling its animals and caused its “investment finances [to shrink].”

“Since we can’t have any benefits, we thought why not feed them to the tigers, at least we can save on animal feed,” one unidentified investor told Chinese newspaper The Paper.

The shareholders also planned to feed sheep to the tigers and kidnap the animals to sell them elsewhere and recoup their loses, but zookeepers stopped them.

The clip has since gone viral and sparked outrage on social media.

“Jesus. Could there [be] any worse fate then being an animal in a Chinese zoo?” one user tweeted.

“Appalling what money does to people! Lock these people up,” another Twitter user wrote. “They do not belong in any civilized society!”

The zoo said in its blog that it was “deeply sorry” and that “a similar incident would never happen again.”