Copenhagen Zoo euthanized a healthy young giraffe named Marius on Sunday due to the duty to avoid inbreeding.
Though a petition was signed by thousands of animal lovers, zoo officials dismembered the body of the giraffe and fed it to the lions in front of an audience, according to CNN. The audience included children and other guests.
The zoo defended its decision saying that Marius had no place left in the herd. "Our giraffes are part of an international breeding program, which has a purpose of ensuring a sound and healthy population of giraffes," Bengt Holst, scientific director at Copenhagen Zoo. "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."
The death of the giraffe has caused outrage online. 27,000 people signed the “Save Marius” petition and it was ignored.
Several other zoos offered to take Marius in, but the officials at Copenhagen say that the transfer of Marius would only cause inbreeding. Among the zoos that offered was the UK’s Yorkshire Wildlife Park who said that they were saddened by the death of the giraffe, according to BBC.
Stine Jensen, from Denmark's Organization Against the Suffering of Animals said that, "It just shows that the zoo is in fact not the ethical institution that it wants to portray itself as being, because here you have a waste product - that being Marius.”
The Copenhagen zoo kills 20 to 30 animals for the same reason each year. The situation of Marius has caused an uproar online throughout the world.