Three lions die of heat-related causes at Tokyo zoo amid extreme temperatures

In the sweltering summer of late July, three lions at Tama Zoological Park on Tokyo's western edge succumbed to severe dehydration and organ failure as record heat overwhelmed the park's capacity to protect them. Their deaths — amid a city where hundreds of humans were simultaneously hospitalized for heat-related illness — speak to a deepening tension between the designed environments of captivity and the intensifying extremes of a warming world. Zoos, unlike wild habitats, offer no migration, no escape; the animals within them are wholly dependent on human ingenuity and resources that, at the