Living in a disposable culture
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Why Copenhagen Zoo's killing of a healthy young giraffe sends the wrong message to today's youngsters.
AS I write this week’s column, I’m watching the news on CNN. Amongst today’s controversies is the Copenhagen Zoo’s decision to kill Marius, a healthy, two-year-old giraffe, and feed his body to resident lions and tigers.
The zoo argues that Marius’s genes are already part of the giraffe herd, and if they had allowed him to breed, the resulting inbreeding would have weakened the herd’s health.
Several other zoos, in Europe and elsewhere, offered to take Marius, but the zoo refused. “We didn’t know what would have happened to the giraffe if we’d sent him to another zoo,” an official explains. “He could have ended up in a situation unsuitable for a giraffe. It was much better for us to put him down.”
The killing was painless, a vet explains. When Marius lowered his head to take some rye bread, his favourite treat, the vet easily shot him in the head with a bolt gun, a weapon commonly used with large farm animals.
“Thus the giraffe died happy,” the vet smiles.
Marius was killed in front of an audience of zoo-goers and their children. The audience was also allowed to witness how the giraffe’s body was cut up for the lions and tigers and how the cats finished off the meat.
“It’s part of a learning exercise so that children can see the circle of life,” a zoo official explained.
Really? In nature, animals die clean deaths from bolt guns after enjoying a treat of some rye bread?
I’ve never worked in a zoo, but I can surmise that every zoo has to deal with a species “overflow”, when the facility has too many of one kind of animal.
When there’s an overpopulation, some facilities have “special arrangements” with other zoos or even with animal traders and such. Other facilities, like the Copenhagen Zoo, solve the overpopulation problem with a bolt gun and a bunch of hungry cats.
I can’t help thinking, though, that the bolt gun solves lots of other problems. You don’t have to be too careful about your breeding programmes, do you, if you simply kill off any animal you decide you don’t want or need.
The overpopulation situation isn’t limited to zoos. A few years ago, I had the unhappy experience of watching a “farang” family here in Bangkok put down a litter of puppies.
In front of my horrified eyes, the man and his wife matter-of-factly put the litter in the boot of their car, turned on the engine and let the puppies die from carbon monoxide poisoning.
“It was for the best,” the woman said, explaining that the family didn’t want the puppies and that the puppies’ mother wouldn’t miss them. “After all, she’s just an animal,” the woman said.
The mother dog didn’t look very happy to me. She ran from room to room searching for her babies.
“If you don’t want puppies, why don’t you have the mother spayed?” I asked.
“Oh, we’d never do that,” the woman said. “Neutering is against nature.”
To me, it was a strange message they were sending to their children, similar to the message the zoo seems to have sent to its own audience – that the animals under your responsibility can be killed whenever you wish.
It doesn’t matter that you’re responsible for the animal having been born in the first place or that you’re responsible for its health and well-being.
Well, we have all sorts of disposable things – phones, nappies, newspapers. Teaching our children that animals are disposable too is simply the next step in our disposable culture.
I just wish they – the zoo and the farang couple – hadn’t seemed to enjoy killing helpless animals so much.
