“It sounded like they were trying to wind us up,” Thomas Lessmann's widow Petra told the paper. Complaining he was feeling ill and frequently losing consciousness, the 51-year-old Lessmann went to a clinic in Eppendorf, near Hamburg in northern Germany, which referred him to the nearby Hagenbeck Zoo.

His pride wounded, he refused to go and died 13 days afterwards, the paper said. The cause of death was unclear.