Epitaph on a giraffe

I find it singularly apt that the giraffe was named Marius. Nothing better than a good old-fashioned Roman name, if you're going to slaughter its owner and feed the remains to the lions in front of an audience of enthralled spectators.

By now you might have read about or even seen the details of this bizarre and very contemporary tale from Denmark. Marius was an 18-month-old giraffe kept at the Copenhagen Zoo... until the zoo's management one day decided to kill it, dissect the body in front of a live audience, and dole out the pieces at feeding time.

News of the plan travelled far and wide long before execution day, and as you can imagine pissed off no small number of animal lovers worldwide. There were protests, petitions, calls for a boycott, and - ultimately - death threats to the zoo staff. Just like any other widely-publicised story involving the killing of cute, cuddly animals, I suppose.

But let's backtrack a bit. To be perfectly honest I can't claim to have been particularly outraged, either by the killing of Marius or by the filmed dissection of his remains. I am fully aware that animals are killed and publicly dissected in zoos all over the world; and in this respect Marius' death was no different from that of countless other zoo animals which don't benefit from global media attention. Nor do dissections trouble me unduly. I have distinct childhood memories of accompanying my elders to butchers before this grand age of global sanitisation; and if it wasn't gutted pigs hanging from spikes, it was live turkeys being beheaded behind a curtain in the room next door. To this day, the sound of the chopper hitting the block still echoes somewhere in my head. But it doesn't stop me eating both pork and poultry.

Besides: like many people I can also see multiple paradoxes staring back at us from a confused riot of bewildered and outraged reactions worldwide. Lions, tigers and polar bears all eat meat; and whatever they are fed in zoos will have once been another living creature, and will likewise have had to be slaughtered beforehand. So why should it make any difference if it was a giraffe this time, and not, say, a pig or a goat or a cow?

And this raises what is probably the central irony, at least insofar as the defenders of the zoo's actions are concerned. It is far likelier that a lion in the wild would eat a young giraffe than a pig. But we don't see global protests each time that happens on the Africa savannah. Why should it be any different just because it happened in a Danish zoo?

So all things told, I did not share in the general revulsion that greeted the death of Marius. And yet I still found the entire exercise intensely distasteful. There was something vaguely wrong with it somehow; and because I know (for all the above reasons) that my reaction had nothing directly to do with animal welfare issues, I decided to try and track down what it was that irked me so much about this story.

Why did they kill Marius, anyway? This is from the zoo's official justification, issued in the face of a storm of protests: "[We] took a transparent decision that the young animal in question could not contribute to the future of its species further, and given the restraints of space and resources to hold an unlimited number of animals within our network and programme, should therefore be humanely euthanised."

Immediately my eyes fell on the last word, which gave me the first clue. Sorry, Mr Zookeeper, but Marius was not 'euthanised'. The word has a meaning, you know, and I'm a bit of a stickler for these things. Euthanasia is very often described as 'mercy killing'; and while I admit that provides a fairly exhaustive umbrella to cover most eventualities, the underlying principle (or 'pretext', depending how you look at things) is always that it is in the individual animal's own interest to be killed.

I won't go into the complexities of the euthanasia controversy itself: partly because the subject is only ever controversial when dealing with humans; and partly because, like I said, Marius was not 'euthanised' anyway, so the word simply doesn't apply. It would have applied had Marius been suffering: in which case you could argue that putting it out of its misery was a merciful thing to do. But killing a healthy, non-suffering animal because you don't have enough room for it in your zoo - or because, in your opinion, it's genes just aren't good enough for the species - is not 'merciful'. It's actually rather mean.

So by describing it as 'euthanasia' - in a country where limited euthanasia is already available for humans - the Copenhagen Zoo was simply camouflaging its real intentions in the guise of something slightly more palatable than it actually was.

Meanwhile from the press release it transpires that Marius' death might have been avoided altogether, had the Copehagen Zoo possessed the "space and resources to hold an unlimited number of animals". And that leads directly to a second clue. This is from a report in The Guardian: "Yorkshire Wildlife Park (YWP) was among several zoos that offered to rehouse Marius - a private individual apparently also offered to buy him for €50,000 (£41,000) - but received no response."

Suddenly the "limited space" argument doesn't seem very plausible, in light of the fact that the same zoo did not even acknowledge any of several offers to rehouse the giraffe somewhere else. If the issue really was space... why not let Yorkshire Wildlife Park take him? Why pretend you never received the offer of an alternative solution... and then turn around, shrug your shoulders and say: "sorry folks, this hurts us as much as it hurts Marius... but we simply didn't have any option"?

Clearly the official justifications do not add up. Options existed, but were deliberately ignored. And from this perspective, the behaviour of the zoo in question can be seen to have all the hallmarks of an obstinate, unswerving resolve. It would appear that there were forces at work that wanted Marius dead at all costs... enough to ignore any alternative courses of action, even the ones listed in the zoo's own official press release.

Then I watched the video clip showing a largish number of people watching enthralled as Marius was chopped up into pieces and fed to the lions. And it hit me: the clue was in the name all along. What happened in present-day Denmark really was indistinguishable from the grisly fare on offer at Rome's Circus Maximus in the days of Nero and Caligula (and indeed throughout human history in different forms); whereby the grotesque, the bizarre and the downright cruel has always been packaged for human consumption as 'entertainment'.

It is also indistinguishable from a growing media culture which tends to treat embarrassment, misery and weirdness of any kind as a spectator sport. We see it all the time, in shows like 'The X-Factor' and '[Insert country name here]'s Got Talent'; and much as we marvel at the occasional moments of sheer brilliance on the stage, we also revel in the far more numerous moments of cringe-worthy stage meltdown... when the aspirations of a human being are likewise slaughtered and dissected in front of an live audience, and then fed through YouTube to satisfy the masses' global hunger for humiliation.

It seems that Marius died to feed the same appetite. His avoidable death became unavoidable the moment the Copenhagen Zoo's administration decided to make a public spectacle out of it: to invite a live audience, to film proceedings and disseminate the footage through the worldwide web. And even though solutions were meanwhile found aplenty, by that time the appointment with mass entertainment had become an unstoppable force in its own right.

For Copenhagen Zoo, the public slaughter of Marius the giraffe became an important marketing device with which to boost flagging zoo attendance. But much more importantly, there was a hungry global audience to feed out there... and it wouldn't have been satisfied by the traditional ending whereby "Marius lived happily ever after until the end of his days".

And yes, I know it's just a giraffe, and that animals are brutally slaughtered every day at the Marsa abattoir without anyone ever batting an eyelid. But I still think it's sad that a zoo would go to such extraordinary lengths to destroy a perfectly healthy animal, just to satisfy a human craving for the macabre.