Help me understand the logic here with Marius the giraffe having to be put down and then being slaughtered in public?

What the fuck is wrong with those parents standing by allowing their young kids to watch?
As for the giraffe, seems a shameful waste of life when others were willing to take it on.

You humans disgust me.

The public autopsy was shameful.

I don’t like this. And I don’t exactly like zoos either. But, if you’re gonna have zoos, the carnivores at the zoo gotta eat something. Unless there is an extinction risk, I really don’t see what difference it makes whether it is a “surplus” giraffe or stray cat or Christian that gets fed to the lions. The carnivores don’t live lives of meditative veganism when they enter the zoo; they’re still carnivores.

A “genetically more important giraffe?”
Denmark Zoo should not be making decisions for other zoos. If another zoo put out an offer to take the giraffe in, then Denmark should have saved face and traded it to them for a “genetically superior” giraffe, if that’s what the reason for execution was.
He looked like a fine specimen to me. Poor guy.

Sad and archaic.

I can’t. I can tell you I read about it and cried at the horror of people and the world.

Some people have no respect for life and living. No wonder we are quickly destroying ourselves. I think humans must hate themselves most of all.

I didn’t even click on the video. Just based on what others have said, I knew I would find it far too upsetting and keep me up tonight. The tortures that are inflicted upon our fellow living creatures is incredible. It makes it difficult to have any faith whatsoever in humanity, compassion, dignity or love for anything. Human beings are the lowest form of life.

I’m not a huge fan of zoos either, but I understand that some of them do important conservation work. The Copenhagen Zoo appears to have a team that does great work for giraffes; I would be surprised if these people didn’t care very deeply for their animals.

That being said, I am not surprised that they did not accept hail Mary offers to make a home for the giraffe. Moving zoo animals is not something that is done on an emotional basis; likely the new home would have had to go through some pretty rigorous vetting to see if they could care for the giraffe over the entire course of its life, and not just throughout the “You’re a hero!” media blitz that would follow. And then, what would they do about the next giraffe in Marius’ situation? Are we going to find homes for them all?

From what I’ve read on this, it doesn’t sound like the slaughter was public – only the autopsy. As to whether the autopsy should have been public, I’m of two minds. I know that as a graduate student in biology, I was jealous of the few students in my department who had the opportunity to attend autopsies of large mammals in zoos (these were very few, and done privately). So, I can understand that a public autopsy is something of a gift. However, it is a wasted one if it will turn public support away from the zoo. The zoo let the parents decide whether or not to bring children – again, great for the few who might benefit from the learning experience, but will the parents make the correct decision for their kids? I don’t know. Neither could the zoo. But consider – children who grow up on farms are not oblivious to the deaths of animals. Apart from it being a giraffe, I would bet that this wasn’t a new experience to every child there.

My response is to trust the zoo in the matter of putting down the giraffe, but I think they made an error in allowing the autopsy and feeding of the giraffe to other animals to be public.

And I would urge everyone to remember that we would not even be having this discussion if Marius were a cow, or a deer, or a mouse.

I keep hearing bits and pieces about this and I’ve decided this is one of those things I just don’t want to investigate further.

What a horror show!! Poor Marius.They could have given him the snip or given him to another zoo. It’s really very upsetting to see kids and people watching while you skin the animal and cut it up.
As per news reports they say the zoo authorities wanted to give children a huge understanding of the anatomy of a giraffe that they wouldn’t have had from watching a giraffe in a photo.
This world is so cruel. It’s so sad and depressing.

I agree, or at least concur, with @glacial. I don’t see the big deal about people seeing an animal being butchered. I’m guessing most of the people here are meat eaters themselves. Agriculture has been a normal part of human life for all of history and then some. Even if you aren’t meat eaters, you probably tolerate the existence of zoos. The carnivores are going to be fed something that probably would, given the chance, prefer to live.

If genetic diversity was the issue, it would have been nice for Marius if they just castrated him and shipped him to another zoo, I guess. (Hell, I’d prefer to let the poor thing go in the wild. I hate seeing sentient living things locked up.) But he’s just one animal out of the hundreds these lions are going to eat in their lifetimes, and I would venture to guess no one here would give that a second thought if it weren’t for the press conjuring up a shitstorm about this.

I wonder what happens between giraffes and lions in the wild.

I wonder if there would be so much made of this if it was something other than a giraffe… you know, something more run-of-the-mill(for lack of a better term), something that isn’t one of the first kinds of animal little kids can recognize. Something less ‘popular’ to the public. Having made the decision to put the animal down, I see nothing wrong with using it to feed the carnivores in the zoo. Would it have been better to rehome him? Maybe… but what about stress to the animal during the moving process? I don’t pretend to know what’s involved but I’ll bet it isn’t without risk to the animals. Allowing public viewing of autopsy- ‘Yes, Johnny, meat comes from animals. In Africa, the lions kill the giraffes and eat them. The zookeepers will feed this one to the lions here.’ I don’t see the big deal here, either, except for the ‘yuck factor’.

Does this help?