WARNING: Graphic

GRAPHIC photographs have emerged of the Australian kangaroo on an intravenous drip and its bloody nearly-severed paw after it was pelted with bricks in a Chinese zoo and died.

One photo shows the ailing kangaroo lying in its stall with the IV drip hooked up to one of its hind legs and a cloth or bag over its head.

Another photo shows the bloodied wound on its paw sustained when visitors to its enclosure in Fuzhou Zoo in southeastern China threw brick and concrete at it purportedly to make it hop more.

Further photos show the missiles lying around the enclosure taken from nearby garden beds, and the 12-year-old female kangaroo writhing on the ground and lying prostrate.

A sign at the zoo warns visitor not to feed or tease the animals.

But visitors to the zoo in Fujian province reportedly threw the bricks at it and another kangaroo in an effort to get a response from the animals.

The female kangaroo suffered a severely injured paw and died days later from a ruptured kidney caused by being struck by the projectiles, a Chinese veterinarian concluded.

The attack on the animal happened on February 28, but was only revealed by China Central Television last weekend.

Weeks after the female kangaroo died, a five-year-old male kangaroo at the same zoo was also pelted with rocks and concrete blocks and slightly injured.

The Chinese TV report did not mention whether anyone was punished over the matter.

But it did say the dead female would be stuffed and put on display and the zoo would look to install security cameras to deter visitors from harming animals in future.

China’s lightly regulated zoos and wildlife parks often make news for the wrong reasons, typically involving abysmal conditions in which animals are kept or insensitive actions by visitors in a country where the notion of animal rights is not deeply ingrained.

Among recent examples, horrified visitors to an animal park in eastern China’s Jiangsu province last June watched as tigers killed a donkey that was released into their enclosure by investors angry over a business dispute related to the zoo, according to media reports.

A few months earlier, a zoo visitor died after he was mauled by tigers whose enclosure he entered in the city of Ningbo, south of Shanghai.