Leopards

Leopards are among the animals killed by Japanese soldiers at the Hsin-ching zoo in August 1945, as the Soviet advance makes the collapse of Manchukuo imminent. They have no independent speaking role, yet their presence and removal register the consequences of military decisions in animal lives: the soldiers classify them as potential dangers, while the veterinarian must reckon with their empty cages and with a zoo reshaped by the violence around it.

Place in the Zoo and the Story

The Leopards belong to a group of zoo animals marked for killing because soldiers believe they could attack human beings. In the veterinarian’s account of the aftermath, they are named alongside the tigers, wolves, and bears as animals liquidated the previous afternoon. The order turns the zoo from a place of animal care into a site organized by the military’s immediate calculations.

That classification is not the only measure of the animals’ significance. Their absence makes the veterinarian’s daily work easier, because caring for large carnivores is demanding and dangerous. He nevertheless feels the loss as he passes their empty cages. The narrative allows practical relief and grief to coexist, rather than making the Leopards’ deaths merely a backdrop to human events.

The Killing and Its Military Context

The killing takes place during the approaching Soviet offensive, when the Japanese military in Manchukuo has been depleted of troops and equipment. The soldiers are ordered to eliminate zoo animals that might pose a danger; their action is therefore linked to a collapsing military order, in which the animals are judged according to a presumed threat rather than any immediate act of their own.

The Leopards are killed along with other zoo predators. Later, the lieutenant who led the operation recalls that the soldiers killed the tigers and leopards the day before and compares that order with a further order to kill Chinese prisoners. His remark places the animals’ deaths within the same chain of military obedience, without making the victims equivalent: it shows how the lieutenant understands his assigned role as carrying out successive commands amid defeat.

Aftermath and Consequences

After the killings, the animals’ bodies are removed from their cages by Chinese workers and taken to a warehouse. The zoo’s staff and workers then face the practical problem of what to do with the remains, as the city braces for battle and ordinary services are breaking down. The veterinarian, asked how to dispose of the corpses, has no answer. The deaths thus leave a burden that persists beyond the soldiers’ departure.

The next morning, the veterinarian hears that the tigers, Leopards, wolves, and bears have been killed and recognizes the memory as real rather than a nightmare. The elephants’ continued trumpeting offers relief because they were spared. Later, when the veterinarian begins feeding the surviving animals, the absence of the large carnivores reduces the labor and danger of the task; he feels relief even as he misses them. The empty cages hold both facts at once: the animals are gone, and their removal has altered the work and emotional landscape of the zoo.

Narrative Significance

The Leopards’ brief place in the narrative gives animal life a concrete position within a wartime system that otherwise treats living beings through categories of danger, labor, and utility. The soldiers’ order defines the Leopards as possible threats; the veterinarian’s attention to the vacant cages restores the cost of that classification without claiming access to the animals’ thoughts. Their deaths also recur in his recollection of the killing order, linking the zoo’s destruction to the larger pattern of command and violence in a collapsing state.

The narrative’s restraint matters: the Leopards do not become a separate allegory that erases their existence as animals in a zoo. Their particular circumstance remains visible—their presence in the cages, the military decision that removes them, and the altered work of caring for those left behind. Their absence is therefore both a material change to the zoo and a measure of how war reaches beyond the human combatants.