One afternoon last January, two years after staff members at the Copenhagen Zoo surprised many people by shooting a healthy young giraffe, dissecting it in public, and then feeding its remains to lions, another Danish zoo was preparing for a public dissection. Lærke Stange Dahl and Malene Jepsen—biology students in their early twenties and part-time guides at the zoo in Odense, Denmark’s third-largest city—sat at a table in the zoo’s education room. They were surrounded by skulls and skins, and by tanks containing live snakes and cockroaches. Fruit flies hovered, and crickets chirped. This is where the zoo greets school groups, and hosts team-building exercises, centered on rodent dissections, for Danish corporations.
The next morning, Dahl and Jepsen were scheduled to dissect a young lion in front of a family audience, as part of a weekend-long event called “Animals Inside Out.” The lion, which had been euthanized a year earlier, then kept in a freezer, was thawing nearby. It had been ruled surplus to the zoo’s needs. In 2014, a similar judgment had been made about the giraffe in Copenhagen, known as Marius; its death became a social-media sensation, created panic in the international zoo business, and revealed a proud Danish unfussiness about animal mortality. Although the practice of culling zoo animals—euthanizing them for reasons of population control—is not restricted to Denmark, the practice elsewhere tends to be hidden, if not denied. In Denmark, culled animals are viewed as educational opportunities, and as meat for other captive animals. (A headline at the time read: “giraffe’s killing in copenhagen reveals zoos’ dark culling practices.”)
The women were pleased to have been assigned the dissection. They had an open, earnest confidence, founded, in part, on two years spent leading zoo tours and narrating sea-lion feedings. But neither of them had dissected a mammal larger than a rat. So they had arranged a study session—bringing coffee, reference books, and a laptop whose screen image was now projected onto a wall, just above a stuffed lion. They had cued up a YouTube video of a previous lion dissection at Odense.
“It’s not really different from a rat, except the size,” Jepsen said.
“There’s more cutting,” Dahl said.
They were worried that the lion might not fully defrost before the morning. A colleague, passing through the room, reassured them that a lion’s breastbone was “easier to cut than ice cream just out of the freezer.”
The video showed an outdoor scene. Two zookeepers stood behind a table on which lay a dead lion, its legs in the air. A couple of hundred people, in winter clothing, watched from bleacher seating, with young children at the front. One of the zookeepers, in the tone of a kindergarten teacher, asked the children what they expected to see. A child called out, “Liver!”
As Dahl and Jepsen watched the video, they began to write an outline of their event. They would first need to say something about surplus animals and conservation: the Danes are mindful of maintaining a genetically varied stock of a species, and culling can help preserve that diversity. Then the women would cut into the lion, working from the tail to the head. “Intestines—what else do we meet on the way up?” Jepsen asked, holding a pencil in the air.
“We should definitely take the kidneys out, and the liver.”
“And the spleen,” Jepsen said, grudgingly, as if the organ were not important enough to be included in the dissection.
“Cut larynx off,” Dahl said, summarizing the end of the process. “Blow up lungs. Take out tongue. Cut off head.”
“Shall we take out the eye, if the kids are asking about it?” Jepsen said.
Dahl and Jepsen decided to check on the lion. Outside, it was cold and almost dark; un-Scandinavian birds squawked. We walked to a farmlike area of storage rooms and workshops. Here, two days earlier, I had seen the lion in a walk-in freezer, alongside trays of rats, a sitatunga, and a severed giraffe leg, upright in a corner. The lion, nine months old when it died, looked a little compressed by gravity and bloodlessness, and its fur had an infant paleness; it could have almost been a shorn sheep. A forklift had carried it across the yard.
Now it lay on a pallet on the concrete floor of a small, bare room that is normally used to prepare food for the zoo’s carnivores. Next door, there was a room packed with the remains of horses; the zoo had euthanized the animals after they were donated by members of the public. (These deliveries had peaked at the start of the year, suggesting that end-of-life decisions had been deferred until after Christmas.) The lion’s tongue was lolling out of its mouth, from which a few drops of viscous blood had spilled to the ground.
Jepsen pressed gently on its side with two hands, like someone shopping for a sofa.
“Oh, my God,” she said. There was almost no give.
She brought an air heater closer, while acknowledging a fear of cooking the flesh.
“As long as it doesn’t take us an hour just to get to the heart,” she said.
In 2014, not long after Marius, the giraffe, was shot in Copenhagen, a British zoo professional had a conversation with Bengt Holst, the Copenhagen Zoo’s scientific director and the public face of the zoo’s euthanization and dissection polices. As the Briton recently recalled, he began by asking Holst, “What the fuck were you thinking?”
Zoo directors in the United States and Europe have a recurring obligation, largely unknown to people who run art galleries and amusement parks, to explain to the public that their institutions deserve to exist, and aren’t sad, and will still exist in thirty years. The oddity, and arguable unkindness, of displaying animals that are prevented from doing much of what they do in natural settings—breeding, hunting, walking from here to there—has to be discussed and defended, even on days when public attention isn’t drawn to the issue, as it was by the death of Marius, or by the death, in May, 2016, of Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. Harambe was shot and killed after it picked up a three-year-old boy who had climbed inside its enclosure. The child recovered from his injuries. (Harambe has had a strange afterlife, as a shorthand joke about Internet sensations—a meme about memes.)
The modern defense of zoos tends to refer to four achievements: education, conservation, scientific research, and the societal benefit of getting people out of the house. Much of this is often packed into a single claim, which may be true even if it is unsupported by good evidence: zoos are said to cause people to value wild animals more than they otherwise would, thereby improving the survival prospects of threatened species.
A modern zoo hopes to tell a story of refuge and empathy. So a giraffe’s dismemberment, observed by unsmiling children, suggested a counternarrative, and one that carried a particular risk of public-relations contagion. Giraffes are easy to like—in part for seeming so unassuming about their height advantage—and the international zoo industry couldn’t dismiss the Copenhagen Zoo as a renegade operation. Following Marius’s death, Holst, a sober-looking white-haired man in his early sixties, appeared frequently on television, talking steadily about education, conservation, and scientific research.
When I visited the Copenhagen Zoo, early last year, the grounds were dotted with charcoal braziers, and children were daring one another to put their fingers into the flames. The zoo is compact—lions living alongside camels, as in a picture book. Holst’s office had a view of the cobbled alley, just off one of the main thoroughfares, where the zoo conducts outdoor dissections. His manner, like that of Richard Dawkins, combines reserve and certainty in a way that can suggest adolescence: sometimes, when countering one of his critics, he reddens slightly, and half smiles.
In 2012, Holst became the chair of Denmark’s Animal Ethics Council, which advises the government on issues such as cloning, bestiality, and ritual slaughter. (The council recently recommended a ban on catch-and-release fishing, on the ground of cruelty.) But before the death of Marius, Holst was not a public figure. Today, he has an e-mail folder reserved for death threats. On a windowsill outside his office, there is an award, made of Styrofoam, that he received in 2014, after readers of a Danish newspaper, Politiken, voted him Copenhagen’s “person of the year.” The paper, discussing the award, praised Holst for his “calm, scientific voice,” and quoted an observation of his: “Every schoolchild in Denmark has been on a farm and seen someone chop off a chicken’s head. In this country, we know that it’s sometimes necessary to kill an animal.”
Holst handed me the award, saying, “This ugly thing!” He added that his children had been happy about it. He then recalled that he had been pleased, too. The Marius affair, he said, “started as a shit storm, and we turned it around.”
We walked outside and stopped at a strong-smelling giraffe house. Here, in February, 2012, a male giraffe was born into a herd of seven. In accordance with zoo policy, the giraffe was not given a public name. A zoo animal’s standing, in relation to humans, depends in part on the outlook of the institution in which it lives. An animal can be a city’s shared pet, or it can be a quasi-agricultural team member whose work is to be seen and to breed and, perhaps, to die young. The Copenhagen Zoo, more than most others, aims to include virtually every animal in the second category, and to avoid what Holst likes to call the “Disneyfication” of nature. When zoo animals are anthropomorphized, they become “clowns in our world,” Holst said. (He once described Knut—the famously coddled polar bear in the Berlin Zoo, which died in 2011—as so plump that it resembled “a barrel on four legs.”) Holst, who has a dog named Bassti, went on, “It’s fine to get attached to the animals—as our keepers are. But you also have to be realistic. This is not a fairy tale, where everything gets born but never dies.”
The giraffes were out in the yard. We were standing by a claw-grab machine that was filled with anatomically imperfect plush giraffes. Holst’s challenge is to make an argument about unsentimentality and clear-sightedness in a place that, like almost every zoo, sells toys, surrenders to fairy-tale opinions about the preëminence of certain species, and creates fantasy habitats; the Copenhagen Zoo has placed thatched huts next to an icy field and called the area “Africa.”
Although the giraffe had no public name, the zookeepers needed an easy identifier when referring to its diet or its health. They began to call it Marius. According to Mads Bertelsen, one of the zoo’s two veterinarians, who was present when the giraffe was born and when it died, the name was an homage to a well-liked contractor responsible for collecting the zoo’s trash. In a recent e-mail, Bertelsen put the name in quotation marks. Holst told me that, during dozens of media appearances in 2014, he “always said ‘the giraffe’—deliberately.”
As we walked back to Holst’s office, we passed a display, for children, that arranged suède gloves, a shaving brush, and a salami against silhouettes of their source animals.
In captivity, giraffes can live for twenty-five years. Marius’s misfortune was to be male. Captive giraffes of both genders tend to be removed from their family groups before they reach sexual maturity, to avoid inbreeding; many are then transferred to another zoo. The three hundred and twenty-one members of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (eaza) exchange animals among themselves for no fee; the receiving institution normally pays for shipping.
Male giraffes, once they are one or two years old, will fight with each other when they share space with females. Some zoos keep male-only groups, but the typical captive giraffe herd has several females and only one adult male. It’s the same for many other animals, including elephants. As a result, the over-all demand for males is lower than for females. And Marius was born at a time of giraffe plenitude in Europe. The captive-birth rate had been increasing; as Holst explained, this was in part because zoos had learned that giraffes breed better in groups than in marital pairs.
Marius’s conception could have been prevented, either by separating his parents or by using contraception. This is the preferred American way. But the Copenhagen Zoo adheres to a practice known as “breed and cull.” The case for this policy, which is followed by many other zoos in Europe, if with less gusto, is this: because contraception carries medical risks, and because animals can become infertile if they don’t breed, and because zoos must deprive animals of many natural behaviors, it’s important to allow them to mate and raise infants. “Why take that away?” Holst asked me. The zoo will, if necessary, euthanize an offspring—ideally, at an age when the animal would typically leave its family in the wild. The Copenhagen Zoo culls twenty or thirty animals a year. These are usually goats, antelopes, and reindeer, but the zoo has also culled lions, tigers, zebras, and bears.
The argument in favor of culling extends beyond a notion that sex matters. According to Holst, the only zoos likely to exist in a few decades will be those working to insure that their captive-animal populations are genetically and demographically equipped to survive for many generations. This requires killing animals, he said. “If zoos hide, or don’t want to modernize, some will no doubt go under,” Holst added, without regret.
The underlying proposition, widely advanced by zoo professionals, is that, in an era when it’s no longer acceptable to round up wild giraffes, maintaining a sustainable stock in a zoo is not simply a business necessity; it’s an achievement of conservation—or, at least, a sign of scientific ardor. David Hancocks, a zoo consultant who formerly ran the Woodland Park Zoo, in Seattle, recently dismissed this idea as part of “the conservation myth, where anything’s justified if you’re ‘saving the species.’ ” In truth, many zoo populations are too small to encourage real hope of long-term survival, no matter how fastidiously they’re managed. There are about nine hundred giraffes in eaza institutions; five subspecies are represented, and there are some hybrids. eaza’s immediate ambition is to strengthen four subspecies while allowing the other populations to dwindle to zero. But the organization does not claim that the selected giraffe groups will be large and diverse enough to allow for indefinite survival.
Moreover, most captive populations of endangered animals will never play a conservation role in what remains of the world’s natural habitats. Zoo officials often talk about the Arabian oryx, which was once extinct in the wild and now has a wild population of a thousand, thanks to reintroduction programs, using captive animals, that began in the nineteen-eighties. But such programs are rare: they are costly and require a viable natural habitat, and loss of habitat is the primary cause of species endangerment.
The global giraffe population has declined by nearly forty per cent in the past thirty years, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature recently declared the animal to be “vulnerable” to extinction. Hancocks said, “I don’t think it is at all likely that any captive-giraffe population could replenish the wild population.”
So one can build a better conservation ark, but it will probably remain forever at sea. Dale Jamieson, a professor of environmental studies and philosophy at N.Y.U., who has written skeptically about zoos, put it to me this way: “If I’m a Silicon Valley billionaire who freezes myself at the point of death, is the probability that I’m going to be immortal greater than if I hadn’t? Yes, there’s a greater probability, but is it one that we want to place any value on?”
Nevertheless, many people in the zoo industry argue that they play a role in protecting endangered species. According to David Powell, a mammalogist who recently left the Bronx Zoo for the St. Louis Zoo, breeding programs are conservation tools because they contribute to “fund-raising and education—and inspiration.” This argument assumes that bake sales and documentaries couldn’t achieve the same effect without cages. And the educational claim—what Jamieson described to me as “dreamy stuff about the touch of the tiger’s fur turning someone into a conservationist”—is unproved. The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums recently commissioned a global survey of the impact of zoos on the public understanding of biodiversity; its report included some data supporting the “dreamy stuff” argument but hurried past the finding that zoo visits made people seventeen per cent less committed to take action on habitat protection and creation, and nine per cent less likely to act against pollution and climate change.
But it is hard to question Holst’s premise that, as long as one has zoos, culling helps to keep captive populations genetically robust. In the eaza network, some employees have the job of “species coördinator.” As Holst described it, they have the power to say, “This animal has to breed with that animal, and this offspring has to be moved over to that zoo.” When Marius was born, its fate was nominally in the hands of Jörg Jebram, eaza’s giraffe coördinator. As Jebram and Holst both knew, Marius’s genes were well represented across Europe. Even if there were a space in a herd of celibate bachelor giraffes, it would be better to reserve the spot for a more unusual specimen. When Marius was about a year old, Jebram informed Copenhagen that the giraffe was genetically unnecessary.
At that point, the Copenhagen Zoo might have found a home for Marius elsewhere—say, at an accredited zoo outside Europe. “We may have found a place somewhere,” Holst said, wearily—in China, perhaps. “But we cannot look all around the world every time we have a surplus animal of any kind. Because this happens all the time. It happens every day!”
eaza has estimated that its members cull between three and five thousand animals a year. According to the Copenhagen Zoo, in the five years before Marius was born half a dozen young male giraffes had been killed, quietly but not illicitly, in other Danish zoos.
By the start of 2014, Marius was twelve feet tall. (Adult males can reach twenty feet.) His father was frequently shoving him against walls and trees, and the abrasions left him with furless patches on his neck. A final call was made to Jebram, in case Marius’s relatives in other zoos had unexpectedly died, making him genetically precious. This hadn’t happened. The zoo decided to euthanize Marius on February 7th, a Friday.
Two days before the scheduled culling, someone e-mailed Ekstra Bladet, a Danish tabloid, about it; the e-mail used the name Marius, which had never been shared with the public. (The zoo assumes that a visitor overheard zookeepers talking; there’s no suggestion that a staff member wrote the e-mail.) Mikkel Selin, a reporter for the paper, spoke to Holst, who noted that, were Marius released into the wild, he would probably be “shot or run over two days later.” Holst told Selin that Marius’s autopsy, which had been planned as a private event, would be performed before the public. Most of the zoo’s mammals are autopsied, and these procedures are occasionally shown to visitors. (The Odense Zoo had started doing public autopsies in Denmark twenty years earlier.) For staffing reasons, a public autopsy couldn’t happen on Friday, so Marius’s death was delayed until Sunday.
Being candid about the zoo’s policy didn’t require a spectacle. But, as Mads Bertelsen recently put it, zoo officials had decided “that we would not be bullied.” Even if the zoo wasn’t seeking to create an international provocation, it had made a bold public-relations decision: it would defend its right to kill a giraffe by showing itself to be unembarrassed about killing a giraffe. On Wednesday afternoon, Ekstra Bladet published a temperate story, beneath a photograph of Marius looking sweetly reproachful. “It was for local consumption, for local people,” Holst said. “And we’ve had no fuss whatsoever in the past.” He added, “But it’s one of these animals with the nice eyes, very nice-looking, and a biganimal.”
And Marius was, for the moment, still alive. The Copenhagen Zoo appeared to have scheduled an atrocity. For a couple of days, the story was reported only in Scandinavia. But on Saturday, after a tweet from the president of the Born Free Foundation, a British animal-welfare nonprofit, the story was picked up by the London Independent, then by the BBC, and then by the rest of the world. Chris Zimmerman, a doctoral researcher at the Copenhagen Business School, who has been studying the international response to the giraffe’s death, has counted two hundred and thirty thousand Marius-related tweets, in English and Danish, in the week after the Ekstra Bladet article appeared.
Holst told me that he and other zoo officials received forty thousand e-mails in the first days of the story, including dozens of death threats. Until Sunday morning, “people thought they could save the giraffe,” Holst said. “As if we could be influenced—as if we’d say, ‘Oh! O.K. then, we won’t do it.’ ” Several petitions were started. On one of them, a signatory noted, “I love animals and these people should get the shit beat out of them.”
The media reported on several last-minute offers to rehouse Marius; the Copenhagen Zoo rejected or ignored these offers, surprising many people who assumed that any institution exhibiting live animals would be won over by a narrative of rescue and redemption. Åke Netterström, the owner of a zoo in Frösö, Sweden, that had no giraffes, made one of the rebuffed offers. (He has also tried, unsuccessfully, to acquire giraffes through a private dealer in France.) He recently said of the Copenhagen Zoo, “I think it’s a sickness. They wanted to show the world: We do what we want.”
According to Holst, the Frösö Zoo, which is not part of the eaza network, “had no clue what a giraffe was.” But Yorkshire Wildlife Park, in the North of England, is in eaza. That Saturday, a Yorkshire staff member left a message at the Copenhagen Zoo’s switchboard, offering to add Marius to its all-male herd of four. On Facebook, Yorkshire described this as “an attempt to save Marius.” The giraffe’s supporters were impressed. “You rock,” one wrote. “Bless you for offering him a home.”
The BBC mentioned the offer in its reports. This was, perhaps, Yorkshire’s plan. The zoo’s foundation had recently generated media coverage, and cash, by campaigning to “rescue” a polar bear living in a Mexican zoo. That zoo had no intention of giving up its animal. If Yorkshire had space for a fifth giraffe, then Jörg Jebram, the giraffe coördinator, could have supplied, at any time, the best candidate from Europe’s surplus. Mads Bertelsen, the vet, described Yorkshire’s offer as “a P.R. stunt.” (Yorkshire Wildlife Park declined to comment for this article, and even asked for its decision not to comment to be off the record.)
The same day as that offer, Holst took a call from a Dane in Los Angeles. According to Holst, the caller, Claus Hjelmbak, proposed giving the zoo a million dollars for Marius. Holst recalled saying, “No way. You can give me fivemillion dollars, I won’t take it.” According to Holst, the man got angry and said, “I offer to get you out of this shit, and to save the giraffe, and I will give you a lot of money. How can you dare not say yes? You are a scoundrel, you are a killer.”
When I called Hjelmbak, he described himself, “very humbly,” as “one of the most influential celebrity brokers” in American entertainment. (He has sometimes helped organize parties attended by celebrities.) “I can raise funds to do a party with Britney and Sharon Stone in no time—of course I can save a giraffe!” he said. He claimed that a billionaire, whom he would not name, had urged him to make the call. “She could have built her own goddam zoo and not even worried about it, money wise,” he said. (He recalled offering Holst “a few million Danish kroner.”) The call with Holst, he said, “was like talking to a pervert who was pleasuring himself.”
In 1903, an elephant suffering from foot abscesses was euthanized in the Berlin Zoo. It was hanged, on the premise that this was the most civilized method. A modern zoo sometimes tranquillizes a doomed animal with a dart, and then injects it with an overdose of barbiturates; this is how the Odense Zoo euthanized its young lion. But a tranquillized giraffe might injure itself terribly in a fall, and an animal killed with chemicals can’t become food. On February 9, 2014, before the Copenhagen Zoo opened, a zookeeper let Marius out into the yard beside the giraffe house. With a slice of rye bread, the keeper drew the giraffe to a spot where Mads Bertelsen was waiting with a Winchester rifle. Marius leaned down, took some bread, and stood up, and Bertelsen shot him in the head. Bertelsen is confident that Marius died instantly. (One of his colleagues played a video of the shooting at a meeting of Scandinavian veterinarians.)
The zoo opened at ten. A few protesters stood outside the entrance. In the alley beneath Holst’s office, Bertelsen led the dissection, assisted by Cathrine Sauer Jørgensen, a Ph.D. student in animal nutrition, who was able to add to her collection of digestive tracts from three dozen giraffes. Zoo visitors, including children, stood with no barrier between them and Marius’s body. Bertelsen tried to disregard the reporters and the photographers standing at his shoulder. It was a cold day; people came and went. After three hours, the autopsy was over. “We cut certain pieces up, and put them on our little electric cart, and put everything else in the freezer,” Bertelsen said. He added, “Nobody could eat a whole giraffe.” He took the meat over to the lions. “They’re fed three or four days a week, but they don’t normally get hot meat.”
Images of that meal helped set the tone for what followed. Kirstie Alley tweeted, “Oh man, I’ve seen a lot of abuses in my life, but this baby Giraffe killing at the Copenhagen Zoo is overwhelming. I have to take a cry walk.” On the zoo’s Facebook page, someone posted, “This place is a hell on earth. The ‘humans’ who work there are the real ‘surplus’ in society. These people should be lured away, shot and butchered.” Sergey Donskoy, Russia’s minister for natural resources and ecology, wrote online that the killing was an “unforgivable mistake, an inhumane and horrific act.” An editorial in the Los Angeles Times argued that Copenhagen had broken an “inviolate if unwritten contract” prohibiting the killing of zoo animals.
A few hours after Marius’s death, a news show on Britain’s Channel 4 ran a long interview with Holst. As he recently recalled it, “Something happened in that interview, and that was lucky for me.” Matt Frei, the host, addressed him in a chagrined, accusatory way. “The whole thing is cruel!” Frei cried, adding that the Danish children who observed the autopsy were “clearly freaked out.” John Oliver, on HBO, later drew the same inference from images of children holding their noses at an animal dissection in Odense. Such commentaries seem to suggest that Danish children don’t cry, or hide, or run, when horrified.
Frei asked Holst, “If you allowed schoolchildren—some very young children—to watch the dismemberment of the dead giraffe, why not just invite them in to see the killing?” Holst responded, “There’s no education in seeing the killing.” He said of the autopsy, “Schoolchildren can actually learn a lot from seeing this.” He went on, “To see the big neck . . . and see the big heart. Why does it have a big heart? Well, it has to pump the blood two metres up in the air to reach the brain.” He noted that children “asked a lot of questions, and the vet answered a lot of questions.” Asked about feeding the giraffe’s carcass to the lions, Holst said, “We try to show the public what an animal is, what animal wonders are, in all its aspects. . . . And the real-life lions eat meat, and meat comes, among others, from giraffes.”
Frei denounced Holst as “clinical and cold.” His tone may have puzzled fans of Channel 4’s documentary series “Inside Nature’s Giants,” which also airs on PBS. The show has broadcast the dissections of a dozen exotic animals, including a giraffe.
Holst stayed civil and unruffled, which played well in Denmark. The announcement in Politiken of Holst’s “person of the year” victory noted that Frei had been put in his place, and added that Danes “should not change the world into a Disney one where nobody ever dies.” Zoos everywhere have to counter animal-rights activists who regard zoos as immoral, and calm broader public disquiet about keeping animals in captivity. These rebuttals are tailored to local appetites. With Marius, the Copenhagen Zoo was able to reinforce its allegiance to a strand of Danish animal exceptionalism. Danes aren’t unusually careless about animal welfare, but there’s a tradition of pragmatism—or, a critic could say, an insular and self-congratulatory moral laxity—about animal death. Denmark’s largest pig slaughterhouse is open to the public, and a hundred and fifty visitors tour it each day. One of Denmark’s 2015 submissions for a foreign-language Academy Award, “Men & Chicken,” which stars Mads Mikkelsen and involves human-animal hybridization and bestiality, was, according to its director, Anders Thomas Jensen, “much more taken as a comedy” at home than in the United States. Jensen, speaking on the phone, recalled that in his first film, “Flickering Lights,” Mikkelsen played a thug hiding out in the country, who shoots a cow in the head for no good reason; the animal crumples to the ground. Jensen acknowledged dryly that the film would be “unable to include a tag saying that ‘no animals were harmed’ ” during its production. The cow, which was due to be slaughtered for meat, was shot on camera by a vet wearing Mikkelsen’s wardrobe.
Casper Tybjerg, a film historian at the University of Copenhagen, recently described how his ten-year-old daughter, who was caring for a rabbit at an after-school center, had been prepared by staff members for the likely fate of her rabbit’s future offspring. As Tybjerg recalled it, his daughter was told, “You should know this. There will be all these cuddly things, and half of them will have to be clubbed to death.” This was the Danish mind-set, Tybjerg explained. “We like to think of ourselves as open about things that Victorians were closed-minded about.” This self-image, he said, derived in part from a school of Danish thought, in the early twentieth century, that stressed “a greater openness around sex and death and gross bodily functions.” He noted that Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize pornography, in the late sixties.
Tybjerg is an authority on “Løvejagten,” or “Lion Hunting,” a classic of Danish silent cinema, released in 1907. The film was shot partly at the Copenhagen Zoo. The sub-Saharan savanna was represented by an island in a fjord that Tybjerg described as “about the size of a tennis court.” Two elderly lions, bought from a German zoo, were shot and killed, under watery skies.
“I mean, when you’re dead you’re dead,” Holst said to me at one point. And animals “don’t have any expectations of what happens after death, or that they could have had a longer life.” He said that he recognized just one ethical boundary among species. “I think the only place is between human beings and the rest,” he said. “Some people say, ‘The apes, they are so close to us, they should be in our group.’ But the apes are also very close to the rest of the African primates, so if we take them on, too, then you go down the ladder . . . ” Holst went on, “And since we have agreed on killing animals for consumption, hundreds of thousands of years ago, we have agreed that we can, for a reason, kill an animal, take a healthy life. If there’s a reason for it, we can do it with an ape or an elephant or a horse or a dog.” (The Copenhagen Zoo has considered, and rejected, the idea of breeding animals that could be supplied to visitors as meat.)
Peter Sandøe, a philosopher at the University of Copenhagen, has known Holst for years. Sandøe recently noted that although he accepts the need for culling in zoos, he and Holst have often disagreed about whether it’s better for an animal to be alive or dead. “I’m of an age that whenever I get to a birthday the alternative is worse,” Sandøe told me. “And I have the same view about animals.” He noted that Holst disagrees, adding, “He gets very upset whenever we discuss it.”
Some Danes were unimpressed by the zoo’s handling of Marius. Torsten Jansen, a former cultural attaché in the Danish Embassy in Washington, D.C., and now a lobbyist in Copenhagen, recently compared the episode to the decision taken by a national newspaper, in 2005, to publish satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. He called Denmark “a tiny country trying to get noticed,” adding, “We’re like a younger brother with eight siblings who goes into a store and smashes something.” He said, “We don’t have to display everything. We don’t have to increase the amount of information around our visits to the rest room.”
But Holst received widespread support. Chris Zimmerman, the business-school researcher, has tabulated the hundred most frequently used words, in English and Danish, in the media and social-media coverage of Marius. The language of violence (“murdered,” “execution”) was far more common in English than in Danish, and words of attachment (“healthy,” “baby,” “beautiful”) could be found only in English. Denmark’s largest animal-welfare nonprofit supported the zoo’s decision, to the regret of similar groups elsewhere in Europe. So did most of the country’s politicians. Pia Kjærsgaard, a co-founder of the populist, anti-immigration Danish People’s Party, was out of the country when Marius died, and criticized the zoo in a Facebook post. But, as Holst recalled, “people from her own party, at home, said, ‘Please shut up, you’re not here, finally someone is doing something for Denmark. We have a special Danish view on things—you should defend this one.’ ”
The D.P.P. is now the second-largest party in a parliament that has passed measures designed to make Denmark less attractive to refugees. The rhetoric of pragmatism, or of rejecting political correctness, has perhaps made it easier for Danes to accept an unwelcoming stance. Karina Due, the Party’s animal-welfare spokeswoman and a parliamentarian from a rural district, recently met me in her office and discussed the D.P.P.’s commitment to the preservation of Danish culture. She connected the furor over Marius to urban ignorance of agricultural ways. “In Copenhagen, people think that eggs come from the stores, not the butt of a chicken,” she told me.
In response to the death of Marius, Rufus Gifford, the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark, wrote on Facebook, “I find the situation to be disturbing and the video hard to watch.” Danes responded by referring to the U.S. death penalty, and to a proposal, then in the news, to cull two thousand swans in New York. A few months later, Gifford was interviewed in a Danish magazine; without referring directly to the case, he sought to rehabilitate the word “Disneyfied.” He defined it as American optimism: “It means that we always believe in a ‘happy ending,’ that we can get married to the prince, become a millionaire, and save the world.” (Through a spokesman, Gifford said that the State Department would not allow him to comment further.) Holst told me that he wasn’t sure if Gifford’s comments about Marius were diplomatic, and added, “We are Danish, we work this way. The Americans work the American way.”
The United States experienced its own Marius affair three decades ago. In 1982, the Detroit Zoo appointed a new director, Steve Graham. Arriving from Baltimore, he chose to stop giving animals names, to stop selling surplus animals to dealers, and to publicly acknowledge the need to cull. Graham soon announced the impending euthanizations of four elderly tigers. He and the zoo were sued by the Fund for Animals, and there were well-publicized court hearings. “I wish I could put you in a small, slippery-floored cage,” an anonymous correspondent wrote to Graham. “Then I would torture you each day . . . until you died.” The zoo did kill three of the tigers. Graham, who is now retired, said in a phone conversation that, during the worst of the tiger crisis, Coleman Young, Detroit’s mayor, “lent me his Uzi guy”—a bodyguard who carried an automatic weapon in a gym bag.
American zoos did not follow Graham’s lead. They chose instead to celebrate animals’ birthdays, send surplus animals to roadside zoos, and never talk about death. In current industry guidelines on population control, the phrase “non-living” is used eight times, and there’s no use of a shorter, more common alternative.
America’s folksy model is symbolized by Jack Hanna, the former director of the Columbus Zoo. Now its “director emeritus,” he is widely known for his “Jungle Jack” television appearances. In 1990, Hanna compared Steve Graham to Hitler. (When I spoke to Graham, he called Hanna the “clown prince of zoos.”) In a recent phone call, Hanna argued that Columbus’s keepers would all resign if the zoo introduced culling. He noted that he’d made six hundred television shows about wild animals and had never shown a kill. “There’s enough going on in the world—I don’t need to have a family with children sitting watching a lion take an animal apart,” he told me.
After the Marius scandal, zoos everywhere felt besieged and betrayed. Terry Maple, a former director of Zoo Atlanta, and now a consultant and author, said that the incident was “a huge public-relations blunder,” adding, “It reverberated all over the world. Every zoo director was asked, ‘How can this happen?’ ” The public outcry over Marius’s killing threatened the zoo industry’s ability to present itself as a prime agent of conservation. As Maple put it, “If it hadn’t affected the rest of us, I’m sure we would have thought, That’s a pretty eccentric decision. But when you begin to see how it moves the people who support you—when they’re in tears, and they just can’t believe this—it starts to undermine the credibility of zoos, which have to be justified, have to be supported by the public.” He called the episode “an existential threat,” and added, “We’re under enough attack from animal-rights groups, even when we do the right thing.” A few weeks after Marius’s death, Maple wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which he claimed, wrongly, that the giraffe had been shot in view of visitors. He still refers to the case as one “where you just walk out and kill the animal, I would say in cold blood, in front of your adoring public.”
To the extent that zoos around the world have come to define themselves as scientific, progressive institutions rather than as immersive, slow-motion circuses, Holst had called their bluff. American zoos were keen to distance themselves from Copenhagen, but they struggled to find the right ethical objection. Tom Stalf, Hanna’s successor at Columbus, suggested to me that the children who viewed the autopsy at the Copenhagen Zoo “might be horrified but unaware of it.” He said that they might realize their distress only in middle age.
A few days after Marius’s death, aza, the American equivalent of eaza, released a statement that claimed, in part, “Incidents of that sort do not happen at aza-accredited zoos.” This is accurate if by “incident” one means a particular sequence of bloody events, including a giraffe’s severed neck being transported on a golf cart through weekend crowds. But the statement could easily be understood to mean that healthy animals are never euthanized in the U.S. This is how NPR reported it, and it’s how Wayne Pacelle, the director of the Humane Society of the United States, described aza policy in a recent phone conversation, before he revised his thought. Asked several times if culling occurs in American zoos, Rob Vernon, a spokesman for aza, told me, variously, “No,” “Yes,” and “That’s a good question.” He made the candid observation that his own discomfort reflected the industry’s discomfort.
American zoos do cull, and aza rules allow it. Terry Maple told me, “I would have never done it, most of my colleagues in the United States would have never done it.” He immediately added, “But when you get below the example of a charismatic mega-vertebrate”—a storybook species—“and go to animals that are a little less special, there are cases of killing.” He recalled Zoo Atlanta euthanizing dozens of newborn pythons with his blessing. Maple has written, critically, of “taxonomic élitism” in zoos, but, in an apparent attempt to diminish the act of snake-killing, he described the pythons to me as slithery and mean.
One could argue that certain beloved species should be protected from culling because they’re beloved. (Why shouldn’t humans have favorites?) But Maple was making the case a little differently—by disparaging the euthanized pythons. “They were going to grow into twenty-six-foot-long animals that could eat your dog or maybe your kid!” he said. In American zoos, the preferred term for culling is “humane euthanization”—a phrase that begins to defend the practice even before it’s been announced.
Just as Denmark’s zoos can’t rid themselves of Disney, America’s zoos are more Danish than they would like to acknowledge. At the time of Marius’s death, David Powell, the mammalogist, was researching the use of euthanasia in breeding programs in American zoos. He asked thirty-three zoos about their culling practices (promising not to name them). In a co-written paper, he reported that forty-five per cent of the zoos had said they were euthanizing healthy animals; in this cohort, seventy-nine per cent were culling mammals.
In a conversation that took place in a building opposite the Bronx Zoo’s “Madagascar!” exhibit, Powell said he was confident that these percentages would hold up in a larger sample. He added that aza’s statement about Marius was “unfortunate.” Powell’s paper didn’t include specific examples of species that had been culled by the surveyed zoos. But he had the data on his computer. He opened the file and read from the screen: “Python . . . deer . . . invertebrates . . . ‘Ungulates as needed’ . . . ‘Fish or amphibians only’ . . . Guinea pigs . . . ‘Hoofed animals’ . . . rodents . . . wallabies . . . ‘domestic mammals’ . . . and a tiger.”
Two and a half months after Marius’s death, eaza zoo directors gathered for a conference in Saumur, in western France. The weekend was dominated by fractious debate about the Copenhagen incident. Although European zoos were more likely than American zoos to cull large animals, many of them were no readier to acknowledge the practice. Holst recalled being asked, “Why were you so open about it? And why didn’t you warn us that you were doing it?” Leo Oosterweghel, the director of the Dublin Zoo, which doesn’t cull, had written in an Irish newspaper that the death of Marius was “cold, calculated, cynical and callous.” He recently told me that he found it easier to accept obfuscation than Danish confidence. “I prefer the people with less pride, people who say, ‘Gee, I had to do this, and I’m not comfortable with it, and I don’t really want to talk about it.’ ” He blamed the Marius crisis on the promotion of scientists to zoo-leadership positions.
In one Saumur session, David Williams-Mitchell, eaza’s communications manager, gave a PowerPoint presentation, “What Went Wrong, and What We Should Do About It,” which suggested that one reason for the reach of the Marius story was “media-consumer weariness regarding Syria and other human catastrophes.” The presentation scolded Yorkshire Wildlife Park, arguing that there should be “absolutely no collusion with animal-rights agendas” that might “conflict with the future survival of our members and the species they protect.” An annual report later referred to “gut-churning sanctimony” in some parts of the international zoo community, and described European disunity on the culling issue as the organization’s nadir. Several changes have been made to eaza rules; member zoos are now asked to warn the organization if a scheduled culling might cause a fuss. Since the death of Marius, thirteen giraffes have been culled in eaza zoos.
Haig Balian, the director of artis Royal Zoo, in Amsterdam, told me that he had first reacted to Marius’s death by asking himself, “How stupid can you be?” He then became grateful for the controversy, because it had placed questions about the purpose of zoos “in the middle of society.” His zoo recently introduced a policy of not naming animals, and has begun to list euthanizations in annual reports. In April, 2016, Balian opened a long-planned exhibit that has become, he said, an accidental meditation on the death of Marius. It’s a study of the work of microbes. The body of a three-day-old giraffe, which had died in the zoo of natural causes, was allowed to start decomposing. After six months, the process was halted. The giraffe—looking desiccated but not disfigured—was put on display in a clear, airless box.
One morning in 2015, in a provocation that helped to establish the limits of Danish acceptance of animal deaths, Asger Juhl, a talk-radio host, killed a rabbit live on the air during a three-hour discussion about meat-eating and animal rights. Juhl lifted the rabbit’s back legs—as he’d watched others do on YouTube—and hit it on the head with a bicycle pump. An intern had given the rabbit a name, Allan. “I first had the idea of a pig,” Juhl told me when we met. “But you’d need a vet, and it was too complicated.” After the show, he took the rabbit home, skinned it, and gutted it. He and his co-host ate it for supper.
Holst disapproved. “Why make a drama out of killing to start a discussion about killing?” he asked me. The majority of Juhl’s listeners felt similarly. (And Ricky Gervais, on Twitter, wrote, “I just battered a Danish d.j. to death with a bicycle pump to show how terrible murder is.”) The police opened an investigation. Juhl was interviewed on Russian television. “The angle, more or less, was: People in the West are barbaric, personified by this one man,” Juhl recalled.
Several months later, Malene Jepsen and Lærke Stange Dahl dissected the lion in the Odense Zoo. The lion was largely defrosted, and there was a sour, cabbagey smell in the air. In the audience, young twins with paciﬁers, one wearing a “Hello Kitty” hat, were distracted from the blood and the fur by sea lions swimming in a pool just beyond the dissectors. In the foreground, intestines unspooled, and a translucent bladder of frozen urine was held up to the light. Then there was an effortful decapitation, with Jepsen keeping up buoyant patter as Dahl tried to sever vertebrae, using a knife held horizontally in two hands. “You have to find the small gap and push the knife down, between the nerves and whatever,” Dahl later explained.
At the end of an hour, Jepsen put down the lion’s head, which she’d been holding, and said, “We hope you’ve learned something about the lion and yourself.” There was warm applause.
“It was a surprise how heavy it was,” she told me a moment later. “It was: O.K., I can’t stand too long like this. I think it’s four or five kilos.”
As the crowd dispersed, a dozen children gathered at the table, where internal organs lay alongside what remained of the body. Dahl had blood on the front of her fleece. She showed a boy clumps of horsehair that were inside the lion’s stomach. He looked happy. The next day, a girl of four and her parents came upon a similar scene, following the dissection of a sitatunga. The girl boldly asked to see a bone being cut, but when this was done she crumpled into tears. She was the only child I saw showing any distress. Dozens of others seemed either thrilled or a little wary of a weekend event that had a weekday, classroom flavor.
A boy observing the dead lion asked, “What’s the brown stuff?”
“It’s shit,” Dahl said.
Another boy said, “What a shame for the lion.”
Dahl said, “It’s not a shame for the lion, because the lion is dead.”
A zoo worker was waiting with a plastic wheeled trash can. Referring to the remains as kød—meat—rather than as a lion corpse, he asked if it was time to clean up. He pulled at the lion’s tail, and Jepsen pushed from the other end, and the headless body slid into the trash. “I feel like the undertaker,” he said.
Jepsen and Dahl hosed down the table. “Super!” Dahl said, taking off her gloves.
Source: New Yorker