WTF Copenhagen Zoo??????

A while back I wrote about Copenhagen Zoo's sickening decision to kill Marius, a baby Giraffe. The move angered many animal lovers, myself included and I actively promoted an online petition calling for the resignation of the zoo's director, Beng Holst.

He's still at the zoo and now it seems history is repeating. Yesterday the zoo killed two adult lions and two lion cubs to make room for a new male.

The zoo says they failed to find new homes for the lions and that the new male would have soon killed the other cubs.

I wonder what on earth possessed the zoo to commit such an act when the killing and public dissection of marius was still on the minds of many. Did they really need a new male lion? Were they that short of space that they couldn't rehouse the lions and the cubs in a different enclosure to keep them separate from the new male?

These questions aside, many would be forgiven for doubting that the zoo couldn't find a home for the lions - Copenhagen Zoo said something very similar about Marius before he was killed yet it wasn't long before it came to light that they'd been offered a large sum money to cover Marius's re-homing costs and that a Yorkshire animal park's frantic calls to the zoo, offering to take Marius were ignored.

Although the zoo has agreed not to perform a public dissection on the killed lions, or to feed them to other animals, there are some pretty big questions that need to be asked

Who is doing the public relations for this zoo? Why haven't they been fired given the abysmal job they're doing? Did the zoo's management team even think about the public relations angle given the damage they're doing to the reputation of zoo's all over the world? With the world media spotlight still on them, why invite even more controversy?

Why hasn't Copenhagen's local government stepped in and investigated? There is obviously a clear need for this to happen - Copenhagen zoo must be overcrowded and underfunded if euthanasia is the only option open to them. How many other animals have to die before this happens? Aren't zoo's supposed to be about conservation?

An investigation could at least reveal issues such management incompetence, funding issues or poor resource use.

The bigger issue however is this. Zoo's have long positioned themselves as safe places for animals and they've long been the only places in which some animals can be found as their wild populations have been wiped out.

Yet Zoo's such as Copenhagen all seem to struggle to manage their animal populations - perhaps the focus now needs to become how to re-introduce animals back to the wild rather than killing them because the zoos are out of room/funding or run by psychotic nutters?