The Copenhagen Zoo for this awfulness:
A Danish zoo shot and killed a “surplus” young giraffe and fed it to lions, despite an online petition with thousands of signatures protesting the act.
The Copenhagen zoo said it had to euthanize Marius, a perfectly healthy two-year-old young giraffe, to prevent inbreeding. Bengt Holst, the zoo’s scientific director said Marius didn’t fit with the zoo’s breeding program.
“Our giraffes are part of an international breeding program, which has a purpose of ensuring a sound and healthy population of giraffes,” Holst told CNN. “It can only be done by matching the genetic composition of the various animals with the available space. … When giraffes breed as well as they do now, then you will inevitably run into so-called surplus problems now and then. If we just sterilize him, he will take up space for more genetically valuable giraffes.”
There’s a graphic photo in the Mediaite article linked above, but it shows the dead giraffe — “Marius” — on the ground in front of a throng on people including dozens of small children. Just thinking about this story is disturbing to me. Can you imagine a two-year-old witnessing it?
What we do to animals.