Zookeepers slaughtered a perfectly healthy giraffe in Denmark Sunday, then hacked up its body in front of children and served the remains to lions before hacking up the murdered mammal in front of kids and serving its remains to lions.
The Copenhagen Zoo ignored pleas from animal lovers and shot 18-month-old Marius because they feared keeping him alive would lead to inbreeding.
The zookeepers made a ghoulish show of Marius’ killing by skinning and butchering his carcass in front of visitors, mostly children.
Despite the outcry against the execution, zoo spokesman Tobias Stenbaek Bro said his organization had no regrets.
“I’m actually proud, because I think we have given children a huge understanding of the anatomy of a giraffe that they wouldn’t have had from watching a giraffe in a photo,” he said.
Marius was shot in the head instead of given a lethal injection. An injection could have contaminated the meat.
“In this case, we would never throw away 200 kilograms of meat,” the zoo’s scientific director, Bengt Holst, told CNN.
Keepers killed Marius because there were too many other giraffes in their system that shared his genes, and if he ever mated it would lead to inbreeding. The slaughter was in observance of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria’s standards, the zoo said.
Word of Marius’ planned execution outraged animal lovers. An online petition garnered nearly 30,000 signatures.
Sixteen protesters demonstrated outside the zoo on Sunday, begging it to stay the execution.
But those pleas fell on deaf ears and the zoo fed Marius a last meal of rye bread before putting him to death at about 9:15 a.m. local time, according to the Danish newspaper BT.
“You have to accept that there is a surplus of animals that cannot be included in the genetic chain without causing inbreeding problems,” Holst told Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet.
The Yorkshire Wildlife Park in Great Britain was among several parties that offered to take Marius, and head off his brunch date with hungry lions.
A private individual even offered to shell out 500,000 euros for Marius.
Marius’ brutal killing “should have not have occurred,” according to Stine Jensen, from Denmark’s Organisation Against the Suffering of Animals.
“It just shows that the zoo is in fact not the ethical institution that it wants to portray itself as being, because here you have a waste product – that being Marius,”Jensen told the BBC.
Still, zoo officials insisted their actions were just.
“The most important factor must be that the animals are healthy physically and behaviorally and that they have a good life while they are living whether this life is long or short. This is something that Copenhagen Zoo believes strongly in,” Holst said.
The animal rights group, Animal Rights Sweden, said Marius’ sad plight only highlights what happens in zoos all the time.
“It is no secret that animals are killed when there is no longer space, or if the animals don’t have genes that are interesting enough,” the organization said. “The only way to stop this is to not visit zoos.”