Columbus Zoo mourns loss of 40-year-old grizzly bear

POWELL, Ohio (AP) – The oldest brown bear to have lived at a North American zoo had to be euthanized this week at the Columbus Zoo.

The grizzly bear called Ginger was 40 years old and had become a beloved icon of the central Ohio zoo. She was one of the zoo’s longest residents, having been brought there from the zoo in Cleveland in 1987. Grizzlies are a subspecies of brown bears.

Lately she’d been showing increasingly severe conditions of old age and was euthanized on Thursday.

The average life expectancy for a female brown bear in a North American zoo is nearly 27 years. Ginger lived long enough to break the previous record of about 38 years.

The zoo’s Carrie Pratt says the loss was heartbreaking.