Why Marius had to die

In February this year, Rufus Gifford, the US Ambassador to Denmark, made a trip to Copenhagen Zoo in response to a flood of international messages he had received.

At issue was the death of Marius, an 18-month old giraffe whom the zoo had decided to put down and whose post-mortem had been watched by a group of visitors and broadcast online.

“Despite being personally troubled by the action,” he posted on Facebook ahead of his visit, “I also understand the zoo is trying to teach the public about species, the complexity of life for zoo animals and the life of giraffes in the wild.”

The pre-announced killing of Marius attracted international attention of a kind that could not have foreseen.

While news headlines across the world expressed outrage, an online petition to save him garnered thousands of signatories. A separate online petition calling for the zoo to fire Bengt Holst, the director of research at the zoo and its public face during the controversy, attracted over 123,000 signatures globally. Holst has also received death threats.

Last week, the zoo courted further media outrage by putting to death four lions, prompting descriptions of it as a “killing machine” on Twitter.

The zoo’s carefully-worded explanation of its decisions regarding Marius and the lions seemed to make little difference.

As part of a 300-member European programme, Copenhagen Zoo has commitments to ensure healthy populations of its animals by, among other things, the avoidance of inbreeding. “The most important factor must be that the animals are healthy physically and behaviourally and that they have a good life whilst they are living whether this life is long or short,” said the zoo authorities, adding that the alternatives would have been unacceptable.

They wanted the animals to breed naturally, as they did in the wild, while contraceptives could have bad side effects.

There was also no space for the animals at other zoos within the breeding programme. Autopsies were carried out on all animals that died in the zoo to further knowledge, and every so often these took place publicly for educational purposes.

Such scientific reasoning did not stop Holst from being labelled “clinical and cold” by a worked-up television presenter on Britain’s Channel 4 news when he sought to explain the zoo’s case. Holst seemed taken aback by the presenter’s outrage.

“We are not Disney World or a Bambi World,” he stated matter-of-factly, asking why people should be protected from “real life”. What difference was there, he asked, between the zoo’s policy and the culls of rabbits that took place in the British countryside, where the environment was just as “managed” as it was in a zoo.

The controversy points to a disconnect between public perceptions of zoos and the actual purposes and policies behind them.

While some studies have uncovered poor conditions in European zoos (a 2011 study by the Born Free Foundation spoke of “substandard conditions”), most zoos are much improved from those of half a century ago and are, by and large, cheerful, uplifting places to visit.

Always in need of funding, zoos have promoted Disneyfied images of themselves to boost visitors and donations, helped by “star” personalities such as Knut, the Berlin Zoo’s polar bear. Knut became a global sensation, with even a film made about him, prior to his untimely death in 2010.

A recent National Geographic article defined a zoo as a place “created specifically to exhibit animals to the public.

They collect animals, taking into consideration conservation needs, the potential for scientific research, and which species the public likes best. Zoos buy, sell, trade, borrow, loan out, and breed animals.”

However, it is perfectly possible to visit a zoo while remaining blissfully unaware of its uncomfortable realities, particularly those relating to inmate management.

Many of the realities are a long way from Disney World. A recent BBC story in the aftermath of the Marius controversy revealed that between 3,000 and 5,000 animals a year are “management euthanized” in Europe, under various breeding programmes and for a variety of other reasons, including ill health and safety concerns.

These include hippos, rhinos and a host of smaller creatures unlikely to attract as much public sympathy as their giant counterparts.

In fact, far from being the lone perpetrator, Copenhagen Zoo was following the philosophy shared by most of its kind, which stresses the importance of preserving the species, sometimes at the cost of individuals, and of doing so in a transparent way.

“Unless people get a realistic understanding of nature we can forget all about preservation of nature,” Holst told Politiken , a major Danish newspaper in an interview. “Preservation of nature isn't about saving all individuals, it's about preserving healthy flocks.”

The debate on the ethics of what was done rages on. But perhaps one thing the Marius controversy has done is reveal the need for an open and transparent debate.

In the industrialised West, more particularly its Anglo-Saxon constituents, there is a tendency to sanitise the world of animals, to seek to distance people from what keeping, raising – and eating — them actually involves. In supermarkets, carefully packaged meat is displayed in ways that give few hints of where it comes from.

Children growing up in urban environments often have little idea about the origins of milk or of the chicken nuggets that are such a staple of fast-food outlets.

In Copenhagen, by contrast, children were invited to form part of the audience watching Marius’s autopsy.

If that was a step too far for certain commentators, and for those wishing to ‘protect’ young people from the realities of flesh and blood, it also signalled a departure from hypocrisy, a willingness to acknowledge that caring for animals, and seeking ways to give them a sustainable future, involves difficult choices.