Baby giraffe killed at Copenahagen Zoo

[ReallyTired]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2555079/Danish-zoo-kills-young-giraffe-deemed-surplus-feeds-lions.html

It seems odd that the zoo made the decision to kill Marius when other zoos were prepared to take him. I realise that 200kg of meat is valuable and that killing a cow is no less cruel than killing a giraffe. Lions and tigers have eat meat. Surely beef is cheaper than giraffe meat.

What I find crazy is that the zoo probably could have sold him for more than the cost of 200kg of meat.

[TheDoctrineOfSnatch]

Most dissections don't add to the knowledge of the human race, but most people won't have seen one since they cut up a bit of sheep lung in GCSE Biology. Just as people going on an amateur stargazing night won't discover a supernova but may learn something.

[pumpkinsweetie]

Totally agree reallytired, dignity in death should be made for animals aswell as humans.
Euthanasia is one thing when an animal is perfectly healthy, but to butcher the animal in full few of hundreds, including children straight away after death is purely barbaric to most people that have any compassion at all.

[Pixel]

I think this is a terrible shame and could easily have been avoided.

Re:castration though, apparently it is dangerous to anaesthetise a giraffe because it can easily break its neck when it falls. That's their excuse anyway. Seems a bit odd that they won't risk its health to castrate it, but they will shoot it. Why not have a go anyway, what was there to lose?

[cory]

I breed rare tropical fish for conservation.

I do cull fry. I have to. If I just let them breed and breed they would foul the water and all die horribly. If I let the unhealthy or closely related ones breed, I would not have a healthy population and the object of the breeding programme would be defeated.

Letting a predator into the tank would be unworkable for a simple reason: unlike the wild, a zoo or a fishtank cannot provide the prey with a decent chance of getting away after an initial attack has failed. This has two results:

a) all the fish/giraffes/etd get eaten so any breeding programme comes to a speedy end

b) all the fish/giraffes etc live under an intolerable strain as they cannot ever feel safe: the predator is constantly at close quarters and they cannot get away however much they run because the enclosure is too small (this is why feeding live fish to predatory fish is actually illegal in the UK though fishing it's not- it's about the contant stress)

[Pixel]

Cory that's interesting but I'm not sure what it has to do with this situation? It's not like they are letting the lions loose in the giraffe enclosure and letting them take their pick. The other giraffes don't know that Marius was fed to the lions.

[Pixel]

And no one is disputing that it was right to remove Marius from that particular zoo if he was too closely related to the others to breed with them.
It does beg the question that if they were so worried about their perfect 'breeding program' why was he born in the first place? They must have known the genetics of all the other giraffes in their care so why deliberately breed a 'useless' one? Why did they not sell one of the adults and replace with better stock before allowing them to breed?

[WidowWadman]

Pixel - the Zoo's ethos is to let their Giraffes experience natural behaviour, including sex, pregnancy and child rearing - which is why they don't use contraception.

[Pixel]

Pixel - the Zoo's ethos is to let their Giraffes experience natural behaviour, including sex, pregnancy and child rearing - which is why they don't use contraception.

I'm not saying they should use contraception, I'm saying that if the gene pool is getting so that the giraffes are in danger of being inbred then they should maybe think ahead a bit more and introduce some 'new blood' rather than slaughtering the offspring. (After all it must cost a lot of money to raise a giraffe for 18 months). I don't see why that would affect the giraffes' experience of natural behaviour.

[Morloth]

It is interesting and educational to see something go from being a living being to being meat.

My kids know that when they eat meat it is a big deal, something died so they could use that energy to sustain their bodies.

While we keep animals in zoos this will happen. That is just the way it is.

[TheDoctrineOfSnatch]

Presumably that would involve swapping giraffes with another zoo and breaking up pre-existing groups?

[ReallyTired]

"Presumably that would involve swapping giraffes with another zoo and breaking up pre-existing groups?"

I don't know much about giraffes, but with lots of wild animals young males are driven away from the herd and they have to break into existing groups by taking on and defeating the resident male.

I suppose a lot depends on which you consider to be the lesser of two evils.

[Pixel]

Well that's what I thought, it is actually a more natural living environment if the herd members change over time and I would have thought swapping with other zoos would be very sensible to prevent inbreeding.

[WidowWadman]

They do swap to do exactly that, there's a European wide program. Apparently Marius was at an age where he had to be removed from his heard anyway to prevent fighting.

The reason why they chose to euthanise him is that places in other zoos are limited, and they felt that for diversity reasons it would be better to keep those limited places for other giraffes from a different bloodline.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26118748

[TheDoctrineOfSnatch]

Thanks widow that makes sense.

[WidowWadman]

Also on that article it said a private donor offer €500K for Marius - on the surface this sounds very generous and great, but selling a giraffe to a private person, who presumably has very little if any experience in giraffe husbandry could cause suffering to the animal even if that's not the intention, and therefore isn't unlikely to be a more cruel option than what the zoo has done.