Head over heart: why Marius the giraffe had to die

Zoo-haters, sharpen your knives. For Copenhagen Zoo has euthanised – killed – a perfectly healthy giraffe called Marius that they deemed to be surplus to requirements, even though various other zoos and an American millionaire offered to take him off their hands. The zoo vets then dissected the hapless beast before an audience of children, and the keepers fed what was left to the lions. How can such ghoulishness possibly be justified?

There surely can be no good case for killing an animal that other, responsible people have offered to care for. It costs a lot of money to transport a giraffe, but expense in such instances should be no obstacle – and could surely have been met by public appeal, with a great deal of educational PR along the way.

But the rest is not so easily condemned. The heart may feel that Marius the giraffe (if he really had to be killed at all) should have been given a decent burial, but the head says the Danes got it right. In ethical matters, should we be ruled by the head or the heart?

Or then again, should we have zoos at all? Since I campaigned in the early Nineties to keep London Zoo open when the zoo council wanted it closed, and then argued in my book Last Animals at the Zoo that zoos play an essential role in conservation, I must answer, “Yes”.

If endangered animals are to be conserved at all (and some say they shouldn’t be) then they should, ideally, be looked after in their native lands. But, often, poachers, drought or the relentless spread of cities and industrial agriculture have made their native lands too dangerous. About half of all species are thought to be in imminent danger of extinction. The “charismatic mega‑vertebrates”, including all the big cats, elephants, rhinos and almost all primates are on the brink, certainly in the wild.

So there is a strong case for breeding animals “ex situ”, in captive or semi-captive populations, far from the dangers that beset them at home. The long-term hope is that their native lands may again be made hospitable so they can be returned – which is usually far from easy, but there’s a growing list of successes, starting with the Arabian Oryx in the early Eighties. For extra security, there should be several or many ex-situ populations of each species, spread around the world. The whole endeavour becomes doubly worthwhile if people are allowed in to see the captive animals and learn about them, so common sense and a desire to conserve lead us to re-invent the zoo. Modern zoos are, or should be, a very far cry from old‑style menageries, and they cannot be justified at all unless they contribute to conservation.

The main way for them to do so is by captive breeding – and this is difficult. It can be hard even to keep animals alive, let alone fertile. Many species won’t mate or breed, unless their diet or social conditions or temperature – or any one of a hundred other details – are exactly to their taste. Baby black rhinos were not reared reliably until about 1990, when scientists at London Zoo showed that they require a special form of vitamin E, which they could obtain from leaves on the African savannah but not from conventional sources in England. The kind they need was duly synthesised.

But the greatest challenge is to maintain the genetic diversity of the captive group once they do start breeding. No zoo can keep large populations of any one species, so can have nothing to compare with the herds of the wild. Inbreeding, however, has led to the demise of many an apparently flourishing group. Animals earmarked for return to the wild must be as genetically various as possible so that natural selection, merciless as it is, can run its course. Curators, therefore, must contrive to retain as much genetic variation as possible within populations which, relative to the pristine wild, are tiny.

Serendipitously, this can largely be achieved by a few rules of thumb – and one of the most obvious is to avoid genetic duplicates, especially of males. If two males are too similar, one of them has to go. That was problem the Danes faced, and they rose to the challenge. That is what all serious zoos must do. It’s the name of the game.

What of the decision to dissect the giraffe in public? Doesn’t that smack of the sideshow? It would, if the dissection was simply for spectacle – but that, surely, was not the case. Zoos must educate people, as well as breed animals and carry out research. Humanity right now is standing by while our fellow creatures are wiped out – and we surely would not be so complacent if we knew more, and cared more. Dissection is not the ideal entrée into biology but it can play a part.

_{The carcass of Marius is fed to the lions (AP)}

Was it respectful, after the giraffe had died in the cause of conservation and been cut up to educate human beings, to feed his corpse to the lions? Again, on the face of things, definitely not. But again, ugly pragmatism rears its head, for lions need conserving, too. Meat from wild game, with its profile of unsaturated fats, is better for their health than the saturated fat of standard domestic beef. Can it be right to squander a ton of prime flesh of the very kind they need? Isn’t it merely self-indulgent to succumb to what we take to be our finer feelings?

Surely we critics should remove the beams in our own eyes before attacking professionals who, in this hostile world, do their best even to make life possible for other creatures. Our general attitude towards other animals is, at best, confused. We treat our spaniels and our cats as members of the family – which is fair enough, for modern science is now confirming what pet-lovers have always known: that non-human animals really do think (human language is not a prerequisite of thought), and, as David Hume said 250 years ago, they have feelings. In fact dogs, scientists have now officially confirmed, have a keen sense of justice. Anthropomorphism has been verboten in academic circles ever since Descartes declared in the 17th century that animals are just clockwork toys, but modern science is bringing it back into fashion. In sum, it is perfectly reasonable to treat a dog as a friend.

But animals that aren’t our personal companions, we treat quite differently. Pigs are rushed from birth to slaughter in sweatboxes, while chickens are bred and fed to reach oven weight in six weeks or less. Yet pigs are just as sensitive as dogs, and chickens are no slouches, conveying remarkably detailed information to their sisters and chicks and potential mates through an impressive vocabulary of clucks. None the less, the animals we choose to love we treat as fellows, while those we prefer to eat we treat as commodities. How should we rate giraffes?

Indeed, how, in any situation, can we judge what’s best? It is hard to improve on the Dalai Lama’s universal recommendation – that whatever the particularities, we should always do whatever seems most compassionate. But what, in the case of Marius the giraffe, was the most compassionate course?

Whatever the answer, Copenhagen is not alone. Amid the furore, it emerged that another Danish zoo, Jyllands Park, might have to put down a seven-year-old male, again called Marius, partly because Jyllands already had a male and wanted to acquire a female for breeding and the two males would fight. Last night, this second Marius appeared to have spared. But the questions remain.

For my part, I’d like to see a retirement home for all the superfluous beasts – but if none were ever culled, even slow breeders like giraffes could soon fill entire continents. We can’t escape the ethical questions and the answer to each and all of them, to quote the Duke of Wellington, is a damn’ near‑run thing.

So were I a zoo director, provided it was strictly necessary to slaughter a mature and healthy giraffe in the first place, I would probably recommend a decent burial with a headstone. But I would expect – and secretly hope – to be overruled by cooler heads.

Colin Tudge is a former scientific fellow of the Zoological Society of London and is co-founder of the Campaign for Real Farming. His latest book, 'Why Genes Are Not Selfish’ (Floris Books, RRP £16.99), is available to order from Telegraph Books at £14.99 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk