Mommy, Mommy, What Did They Do To The Poor Giraffe?

At the Copenhagen Zoo last Sunday (on Feb. 9th), a perfectly healthy young male giraffe named Marius was shot and butchered and fed to the lions. In front of zoo visitors. In front of children visiting the zoo. And in case you couldn’t come down to the zoo, you could see the entire “event” -- including the autopsy -- on the Internet.

Bad enough they needlessly killed this young giraffe, but they also invited the whole world to watch them do it.

And then, as if to make things even weirder, the guys in charge of this slaughter-as-educational-experience got defensive and went all “Island of Dr. Moreau” on reporters and repulsed animal lovers alike who dared question their highly questionable actions!

In other words, they started creeping everybody out the way Charles Laughton did in that movie.

Public outcries of Why? Why? (and WTF?) were met with icy disdain by zoo officials and their experts in residence. As in, How dare these ignorant animal lovers question our motives and M.O.? These zoo guys in charge apparently figured they were beyond reproach because they had titles of “scientific director” and “ official spokesman.”  Public sentiment became so vehement, though, that the zoo’s braintrust had to come up with some kind of CYA explanation for their actions. They did, but it was too stupid for even the SyFy channel.

They had to kill this giraffe, they explained, in order to save the species.

Huh?

In order to save the reticulated giraffe population, they had to prevent inbreeding.

So, they had to take giraffes from their natural habitat, put them in a zoo where they could breed in captivity, kill their offspring -- like Marius -- in order to maintain a healthy giraffe population, then feed them to their natural predators -- to lions that would have killed them anyway, even if they hadn’t  kidnapped them from Africa and forced them to live the rest of their lives caged at the Copenhagen Zoo.

As Mrs. Gump used to tell Forrest, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

So stupid that I thought I’d imagined the whole thing. You know how that goes. One night after too many spicy snacks you fall asleep during an “Outer Limits” marathon and the next thing you know, you’re dreaming about a giraffe named Marius. And, in your bizarre, dystopic dream, Marius has to be sacrificed to keep the genetic strain of reticulated giraffe pure...

But what happened at the Copenhagen Zoo wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t even an excerpt from “News of the Weird.” It was real, but so unbelievably real that I didn’t believe it.

Even when I caught just a glimpse of this story on “Inside Edition,” I figured it must be some satirical (albeit sick) piece from “The Onion.” You know, one of those fake articles that some intern mistook for real news. Then WCCO-TV ran a segment about it on its evening newscast. So I started checking various print media for confirmation. Sure enough, Associated Press, St. Paul Pioneer Press, USA Today, and the New York Times all treated this zoo’s euthanasia-for-genetic-purity as a legitimate news story.

It really did happen.

Still unbelievable, however, was the clueless attitude of officials at the Copenhagen Zoo. They just didn’t get it. They really didn’t understand why their actions had upset so many zoogoers and animal rights activists. Zoo spokesman Tobias Stenbaek Bro seemed especially dense, as though he’d been born without any sensitivity or emotional intelligence.

In a telephone interview reported by AP, he declared, “I’m actually proud because I think we have given children a huge understanding of the anatomy of a giraffe that they wouldn’t have had from watching a giraffe in a photo.”

Yeah, they did it for the kids. Like kids really want to see the insides of Babar and Curious George?

I can almost hear those quizzical exchanges between parent and child now:

Lisl: Mommy, Mommy, what happened to Marius?

Mom: Well, kids, the lions were really hungry...

Hans: Mommy, Mommy, why are those men cutting up Marius?

Mom:...and they had to shoot him so the lions could have lunch.

Lisl: And Marius was lunch?

Mom: Yes, honey, the lions had to eat Marius so they wouldn’t starve to death.

Hans: Like the circle of life?

Mom: What?

Hans:  The circle of life, from “The Lion King.”

Mom: Why, yes, son, that’s it! The circle of life!

Hans: But this time, the hunters had to help. POW! POW! Marius got it right in the head. It was way cool.

Mom: Sure, it’s nature’s way. Like we’re really eating cows when we have cheeseburgers.

Lisl: Oh, no, the poor cows. I didn’t know we had to kill them just so we could have lunch, Mommy.

Mom: That’s where our food comes from, honey -- from plants and animals. You see, if you only eat plants, you’re a vegan. If you eat meat, you’re a carnivore. If you eat everything, you’re an omnivore.

Lisl: Wow. I never knew.

Mom: That’s why Mommy takes you and Hans to the zoo: so you can learn things. So, kids, learning IS fun. Now who wants ice cream?

Yeah, learning CAN be fun IF kids are physiologically and emotionally ready for what you’re trying to teach them.

I’m no expert on early childhood development, but I’d bet that A LOT of little kids might not be ready to see an animal killed before their eyes, then carved up for lion food. Sure, lions do eat giraffes in their natural habitat. But these creatures aren’t in their natural habitat, they’re in a zoo.

They were removed from the wild and placed in this artificial environment so we could see them before their extinction. Zoos allow us to get a good look at rare and exotic animals, up close and personal, while they’re still alive. Zoogoers young and old simply aren’t psychologically ready for zookeepers and staff to kill zoo animals.

Of course, these zoo animals aren’t pets. Of course, they’re wild animals. But very few zoogoers -- even eaters of cheeseburgers -- want to see them exterminated at such close, visceral range.

Listen, Bro, when people want to witness life and death struggles in nature, they watch the Discovery Channel. When they go to the zoo, they like to see real animals at a safe distance. They don’t like to see the other animals there killing and eating one another. It’s a boundary issue we’ve designed for ourselves so we can comfortably interact with other species.

As humans, we anthropomorphize animals we know full well are not human like us. It might be silly. It might not make sense to the brainiacs at the Copenhagen Zoo. Then again, maybe we feel a psychic connection to creatures who are more human than these genetic guardians at the Copenhagen Zoo ever could imagine.

Consider the elephant, as an example.

Elephants not only have amazing memories, they also communicate with their own language, grieve other dead members of their herds, and cry real tears.

So when people balk at the killing of Marius are they really being childish and emotional? Or are they experiencing a special connection between humans and animals?

Maybe anthropomorphism is our way of respecting all living things on this planet. Or, could it be that our species  experiences such collective guilt for wiping out so many other species that we’re projecting our humanity onto animals? Whatever’s going on, it’s completely lost on employees at the Copenhagen Zoo.

Maybe that’s why so many kids want to name animals and dress them up in peopleclothes. They’re rejecting the insensitivity and cruelty of the adults in charge, like the ones operating the Copenhagen Zoo. Little wonder nearly all of our little ones prefer the Disneyized version of “The Little Mermaid” instead of the tragic fairly tale penned by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen.

It’s official: most people -- kids AND adults -- would rather have happy endings than giraffe carnage.

Unfortunately, the braintrust at the Copenhagen Zoo doesn’t understand that. They still consider animals born in captivity as “surplus animals” that must be destroyed in order to reduce odds of inbreeding -- even when inbreeding at the zoo is nonexistent.

So kudos to reporters Jabeen Bhatti and Peter Carvill from USA Today. In their news article (from Tuesday, Feb. 11th) they didn’t compliantly accept Bro’s company line the way so many other reporters and newsgatherers did. Bhatti and Carvill not only mentioned that other zoologists were “baffled” by the zoo’s logic, they also consulted and quoted an outside source, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s simplistic to say the animal doesn’t fit into our breeding plans -- so then why let it breed in the first place if you know it’s not a desirable offspring?” wondered Professor William Amos. “I think it’s a rather feeble excuse. It’s better to have another giraffe, particularly if it’s a healthy one.”

Even more troubling than the cluelessness of the Copenhagen Zoo’s braintrust, though, was its curious stubbornness. Zoo officials were so determined to kill Marius that nothing could change their minds. An online petition to save Marius with somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand signatures was ignored. Offers from other zoos to adopt Marius were dismissed. Even an offer of 500,000 Euros (that’s around $682,000) from a concerned animal lover who wanted to take Marius off their hands was refused. All appeals to keep Marius alive were rejected. Why?

In a telephone interview that appeared in The New York Times on Monday, Feb. 10th, the zoo’s scientific director Bengt Holst explained why he had decided against sparing the animal’s life. According to reporter Nelson D. Schwartz, Bengt believed that keeping Marius alive would have “opened the door to inbreeding and potentially removed a place for a giraffe whose genetic makeup was more valuable in terms of future offspring in captive breeding programs.”

So reticulated giraffes can’t get spayed or neutered?

Funny how guys like Holst and Bro, with their superior yet faulty brain functionings, always have ironclad job security. They always seem immune from job loss or demotion. Personally, I’d like to give them both new jobs: cleaning out the animal cages at the zoo (This one’s for you, Marius).

But now we come to the most startling aspect of this story:
It’s happened before. They’ve done it before.

In 1975, the largest captive herd of giraffes was slaughtered at a zoo in Czechoslovakia. No kidding, I’m not making this up. So this kind of senseless slaughter of exotic, peaceful zoo animals has happened before and will probably happen again.

In fact, this other real-life slaughter was turned into a work of fiction called -- surprise! -- Giraffe. Author J.M. Ledgard made a stunning debut as a novelist in 2007 with this book and received favorable reviews. The Chicago Tribune called his work a “poetic account of the asphyxiation of spiritual life in a repressive society.”

The New Yorker declared “...Ledgard’s meditative novel creates a textured allegory for the country’s oppression by its Communist regime...The use of recurring images -- mermaids, a rusalka (a Slavic water nymph) -- conjures a world of fantasy and menace, balanced between dream and nightmare.”

But did the Czechs HAVE to kill their giraffes?

In the novel, the herd was diseased. So there was a somewhat reasonable explanation for destroying these giraffes. Did that really happen? Or did Ledgard’s fiction turn out to be more rational and reasonable than reality?

Seven years after its publication, Giraffe remains a cautionary fable that the Copenhagen Zoo refuses to heed or understand. Pretty soon every Sunday in Europe is going to be “Kill A Giraffe Day...” Just another day at the zoo, be it in Czechoslovakia or Denmark.

Mommy, Mommy, why do so many Europeans hate giraffes?