Tragic inevitability of latest zoo deaths

We may deplore the latest announcement that captive wild animals held in a European zoo have been killed – but we should not be surprised. Copenhagen Zoo, which caused a worldwide outcry last month by killing and publicly dissecting 18-month giraffe Marius, has now killed four lions to make way for a new male.

According to the zoo, it made “a change” in the lion pride because it had received a new male lion from Givskud Zoo, also in Denmark, as a means of preventing inbreeding at Copenhagen. The new dynamic of the pride would have put existing members, and potentially the newcomer, at risk of aggression. Which meant that four of the existing pride simply had to go.

As I said when interviewed for an excellent BBC Radio 4 documentary,The Report, broadcast in the wake of the Marius episode, at least Copenhagen Zoo was honest about its highly objective approach. Other Danish zoos are equally open about the “breed and cull” strategy promoted by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), although the same cannot be said of British zoos.

EAZA members subscribe to the organisation's breeding programmes, with a studbook for each species involved. An EAZA spokesman once told us at OneKind that:

“The unnecessary culling of animals is of course avoided wherever possible; however, sometimes the greater good of the population as a whole is better served by allowing the animals to breed rather than engaging in birth control. In a limited number of cases it is then necessary to cull the resulting offspring.”

That was in the context of the culling of red river hog piglets in Edinburgh Zoo in 2010 and 2011. This latest example shows that the strategy extends beyond the culling of surplus offspring (who are often given names and feted as adorable at the time of their birth). This is pragmatic, pre-emptive population management.

And it is not confined to Denmark. From conversations with European studbook keepers, researchers for the BBC programme reported on the deaths of healthy giraffes, hippos, zebras and Arabian Oryx in members of the European breeding programmes, including UK zoos.

According to The Report journalist Hannah Barnes, EAZA does not publish records of healthy animals that have been culled, but an estimate was given of somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 animals being "management-euthanised" in European zoos in any given year. Speaking on the programme, one zoo spokesman suggested that the numbers game was misleading because “you know, most of those animals were rats or mice or something like that.”

Rats or mice or something like that. For OneKind, every sentient individual has intrinsic moral value and we have asked zoos questions about management culling with far less success than the BBC. The response is invariably that population management and ensuring healthy genes are very complicated matters. We get that. But what still perplexes us is how the approach can be justified at all, given that even the healthiest zoo populations are still living in captivity. Successful reintroductions are rare and it must be asked whether creating an international “Ark” of wild animals who will never live in the wild is a valid purpose for breeding them at all.