mouser  - 2014-02-12
At the very least the fed the predators with a more "natural" diet.
But I dont get that in order to prevent in-breeding, they couldn't have simply vasectomized the male. And the slaughter of the animal in public was a bit distasteful (said the non-lion).
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Cube - 2014-02-12 Soo... There wasn't another zoo that could've taken him?
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EvilHomer - 2014-02-12 Transportation isn't free. It would have taken a lot of time and money to send that giraffe to a different zoo, even if there was one that could reasonably accommodate him. It wouldn't be worth it.
Besides, what the giraffeists don't seem to be considering is the basic fact that lions eat meat. Meat (obviously) comes from animals, and every meal a lion eats necessarily involves the death of something. If it wasn't the giraffe on their menu, it would have been a different animal; in all likelihood, it would have been a great number of smaller animals, such as chickens or wild fowl.
So what makes the giraffe so special? What makes his life more important than the life of any other potential prey animal, let alone more important than a dozen potential prey animals whose total edible body-mass would be roughly equivalent to that of the giraffe?
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Anaxagoras - 2014-02-12 To answer Cube:
Short answer: no, there wasn't.
Long answer: The Danish zoo belonged to a (large) ring of affiliated zoos whose credentials were known & trusted. None of those zoos had room.
They only wanted to ship animals within the affiliated set of zoos in order to be sure that the animals got proper care in their new home. In the past there had been problems shipping animals to establishments, only to later find out that the animals were given grossly inadequate care.
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infinite zest - 2014-02-12 For some reason the website's video runs really slow for me so I may have missed it, but did anyone at point suggest using the potential donated money to transfer it back into the wild, not just another zoo? That's what we did with Keiko, and we all know how disastrous that was, but giraffes don't have the same gang mentality as Orca whales. So even if the giraffe was born in the zoo and didn't know what it was like to fend for itself, it's not like any zoo I've been to is just like "here you go giraffe, time for food" without making some attempt to emulate the giraffe's natural habitat, for the giraffe and the zoo-goers' benefit.
Sure, the giraffe would be lion/hyena etc. meat some day, probably quicker than naturally wild ones, but nature's like sausages: you might like it but you don't like to see it get made, and especially put on display for "educational" purposes.
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infinite zest - 2014-02-12 I really don't have any empathy for the zoo itself on this one. Imagine if this was an impovrished or inbred family who had another baby that they couldn't afford to take care of, so they put it on the the middle of the freeway and let it crawl around until it was hit by a car, and filmed the whole thing, as if it was "educational" - this is what happens to babies on freeways.
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infinite zest - 2014-02-12 AFTER putting something on facebook or twitter or something saying "we can't take care of this", and someone suggesting a foster home. It's a part of the country, in theory, where all the orphanages are full, so someone replies "I'll take your baby!" or "We'll pay for your baby to be sent to this foster home" and they family went ahead and did it anyway. Ugh.
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EvilHomer - 2014-02-13 Zest, three things. First, it's a giraffe, not a baby, you can't compare the two. Second, babies on freeways are neither natural nor necessary; lions having a meal, are. And third, some people DO like learning how their sausages are made! The zoo did not force anyone to watch this, so evidently, the people who stayed to watch are the non-squeemish, intellectually curious sort.
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Born in the RSR - 2014-02-12
Easterly rural-mass-lamb-slaughter was a staple of my childhood, also X-mas rural-single-pig-slaughter (which was much more horrifying due to the noise). I couldn't say it traumatized me (much), my job was always to wash the pig-guts with grandma.
This is pretty cool, you humanely get rid of an excess giraffe and recycle it to the lions.
And those kids have their parents with them, it's not like the Zoo Ludovico'd some poor preschoolers to teach them a lesson about the circle of life or anything.
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TheOtherCapnS - 2014-02-12
The cognitive dissonance of many animal rights people is almost staggering at times. Like Ricky Gervais' social media feed, where he will talk about how we need to show compassion to all living things, then make a post about how he wishes it was legal to put a bounty on the teeth of ivory hunters because then he would spend his entire fortune doing it.
I'd make a large bet that the same people who are threatening the zoo staff are the kind of vegans who will smugly talk about how there's never any reason to make animals suffer.
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TheOtherCapnS - 2014-02-12 Oh I still follow him. He may be at times self-righteous and hypocritical, but he's often funny as shit.
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infinite zest - 2014-02-12 Yeah because burning the zoo would be good for the animals. "Hey Copenhagen zoo, we're gonna burn your zoo.. can you please transfer all of the animals somewhere else first?"
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StanleyPain - 2014-02-12
This didn't offend me because of the giraffe dying (although it seemed unnecessary when people were willing to pay for it's transfer), but why the fuck would you do this in front of school children?
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Cena_mark - 2014-02-12 Seriously though as a kid that was highlight of any nature documentary. "This is boring... Oh snap! Is that blood? Hell yeah, look at that lion tear up that Zebra!"
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EvilHomer - 2014-02-12 Yeah, Cena's right, as usual. School kids are bloodthirsty little fucks.
My grandma almost got eaten by lions when I was about their age. We were at Chessington Zoo; she was in an elevated tram car that broke down over the lion cage and, thanks to a sudden storm, nearly tipped off the track. All the grown ups were horrified. I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.
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EvilHomer - 2014-02-12 Giving children the chance to watch animals shit, fuck, and fight is the whole reason we have zoos.
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takewithfood - 2014-02-12
What do they think the lions normally eat? Quinoa?
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Robin Kestrel - 2014-02-13
They could have just put the giraffe in the lion compound and taken bets on how many lions would get kicked to death before the giraffe went down, but I guess that sort of thing is generally frowned upon by the Zoo Gaming Commission.
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duck&cover - 2022-08-30 Would've been a more realistic experience.
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