Zoos are changing that concept, as they should. Zoo animals aren’t pets and shouldn’t be treated as such. The public is enamored by charismatic megafauna, but we raise millions of rodents to feed to other predators and no one bats an eye.
Taking care of animals covers womb to tomb (or predator’s mouth.)
It’s a zoo, not the Serengeti. It’s a completely artificial environment.
It’s like letting the cat have kittens and then killing the kittens in front of the neighborhood kids, feeding them to the dog and excusing the whole thing as “the cycle of life. Something has to die.”
No, you can just be banned from ever owning cats and dogs. There’s nothing natural about it.
This attitude of zoo visitors to the animals there is actually a huge problem for the animals. In my local zoo, a woman visited 4 times a week to “smile” at the silver back gorilla. She literally said she had a special connection with him, and that he smiled back at her. One day her smile broke the gorilla’s back and he jumped the ditch and wall to maul her. (“Smiling” is aggressive teeth showing to a gorilla.)
The zoo changed its membership pass so that you can now only visit a few times a year. So the crazies can’t go and stare at the animals every day and drive them nuts. Still, this idea that the animals have names and personalities that visitors get to know: that’s not a good thing. People visiting the zoo should understand that they are watching wild animals, preferably in enclosures that simulate their habitat. In this context, killing the giraffe was doing the public a service in helping them to understand the reality: the giraffe is not your pet. The giraffe is lion food, which is as it should be.
I don’t understand. Yes, he’s genetically useless. There were places willing to take him (not other zoos that need the space for a viable breeding male, I’m talking private zoo collections). Why not let them take him?
Huh, I just checked, and the Yorkshire Wildlife Park is an EAZA member, so there’s no truth in the claim that they were restricted by EAZA rules from moving animals there.
I also don’t quite see why a zoo in Denmark should be making decisions about what a zoo in Yorkshire should or should not be using its resources for either. Weird.
Nobody’s said that Yorkshire wasn’t an EAZA member.
From here.
Maybe Marius is a stereotypic Danish giraffe name, like our Fido the dog or Iggy the Iguana.
But having cows raised to be killed to feed the dogs is okay.
Why is the second okay and the first not? Because cats are considered pets and we anthropomorphize them to some degree. That is what we do with pets.
Zoo animals are not pets. So it does not apply. Yes, some who go to zoos want to think of them that way. American zoo goers seem prone to that and take offense at having that challenged. Apparently the Danish zoo-goer is less so prone and the attitude evinced by the pros here may be why.
Maybe the animals are staring at THEM all day and driving THEM nuts! Ever think of that? 
So, pay a little overtime and bonk poor Marius into the beyond after closing, and feed his anonymized remains the next day to the lions. Zoos aren’t open 24/7. This was needlessly provocative.
I don’t have any issues with the zoo. It was foolish to cut up the animal with kids around. Why couldn’t they have done this before the zoo opened?
The giraffe was put down quickly by a bullet. Meat was used to feed the other animals. Thats reasonable to me.
It wasn’t an accident. The giraffe didn’t slip and fall onto the big knife the butcher was holding. Apparently it is foolish to American message board posters (ie the people who don’t matter very much in this equation), but the Danish people who took their children to see this didn’t think so. The poor kiddies weren’t surprised into a slaughter fest, they were taken to see an event by their parents.
I’m really getting the feeling that what someone said earlier in this thread is true: Americans apparently have some very different ideas about what is bad for children? On what evidence are these ideas based that it is so terrible for children to know where meat comes from? Do we have studies showing children end up as quivering wrecks?
Giraffe is curiously absent from this thread.
How do you prevent large zoo animals from breeding? Castration? Isolation for life?
Chief of Copenhagen Zoo Speaks Out About Giraffe Controversy
As I’ve said before, human fetuses are probably tasty and nutritious if prepared right, yet we don’t eat them for purely sentimental reasons.
Zoo animals aren’t pets, nor are they in the wild, and I object to equally sentimental “circle of life” arguments.
People. They want to see you feed the lions. They don’t want to see you feed the lions. What’s a zoo to do?
But, meh. You know how some places make you watch a gory video of traffic accidents as part of getting your license? Maybe we should have a license to eat meat like that.
Am I really the only person who is outraged by this? They irresponsibly breed an animal and raise him, realize he won’t contribute to their genetic diversity, SHOOT HIM IN THE GODDAMN HEAD and butcher him in front of children… and everybody’s OKAY with this?!
Did I depart planet Earth when I wasn’t paying attention?!
On a more lighthearted note, because of the typo in the thread title, which looked to me like “stealthy giraffe”, I now have a wonderful image in my head of ninja giraffes.
More likely, it seems to me, they meant to make a point.
And it worked.