A kangaroo was stoned to death in a Chinese zoo - apparently for the same reason that a brown bear was once crushed to death by Russian videographers, and a shark in Florida was dragged behind a motorboat like a kite.

That is, to gratify a human.

The kangaroo - a 12-year-old female whose name is not known - was not hopping enough to amuse spectators at the Fuzhou Zoo in February, The New York Times reported, quoting Chinese media.

The kangaroo was not hopping enough to amuse spectators. Credit:Dean Osland

So someone picked up a rock. Or it might have been a brick or slab of concrete, Agence France-Presse wrote. In any case, it wasn't unusual for visitors to this zoo in south-east China to provoke the animals with projectiles.