Marius, The Giraffe Killed And Used For Lions, København Zoo, Copenhagen, Denmark

An otherwise healthy young male giraffe, Marius, was culled on 9 February 2014, its meat subsequently being used for the zoo lions, while other parts were transferred to a scientific institution. Despite offers from other animal institutions (Yorkshire Wildlife Park, UK and Hoenderdael Park, Netherlands) to take the giraffe, Bengt Holst, scientific director at the Danish zoo, defended the culling of the young bull, saying that the giraffes at the zoo bred very well, and where this was the case giraffes had to be selected to ensure the best genes were passed down to ensure the animals' long-term survival. He confirmed the zoo typically culls 20 to 30 animals every year.
Yorkshire Wildlife Park released a statement advising that they had the capacity to accept a further Giraffe in to its Bachelor herd in its state of the art Giraffe house built in 2012, contact was made with Copenhagen Zoo yet despite this contact, no reply was received from Copenhagen Zoo. YWP has previous received a male Giraffe of the same age as Marius from Copenhagen Zoo.
The action has been criticized by Stine Jensen, from Denmark's Organisation Against the Suffering of Animals, who repudiated the action as unethical. She said, "This situation should not have occurred at all. 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. Here we have a zoo which thinks that putting this giraffe down instead of thinking of alternatives is the best option".
Images of the carcass being cut up infront of children watching and then fed to the Zoo's lion population have been circulated by Associated Press. The Zoo spokesperson 'Tobias Stenbaek Bro' has been quoted as saying that visitors, including children, were invited to watch as the giraffe was skinned and parts fed to the Lions. "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," Stenbaek Bro said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.