Taking life is of course a serious matter. But nevertheless, it’s something that happens every day in Denmark today. Millions of animals are slaughtered to satisfy our demand for meat, and dogs, cats and other pets are regularly killed, either because they are injured, sick or simply surplus to requirements. This is widely accepted and is a natural consequence of the fact that we humans eat meat and that we humans have adopted animals. Deer are shot to create balance in the nature we have taken in and which we have a responsibility to manage. And mice and rats are killed en masse as so-called ‘pests’.
At the zoo, we also kill animals. Horses, goats, injured animals and animals that are too old are slaughtered to provide meat for the predators we have taken responsibility for. And some animals are killed because they have become surplus to the population we can keep at the Zoo. By nature, there is a limit to how many of each animal species we can have at the Zoo. Even when they are part of international breeding programs, space is limited, and together with the other zoos, we must continuously regulate the population to fit the available space. This is the same thing that happens in Danish forests with roe deer and in Swedish forests with wild boar. At the same time, we have a responsibility to ensure that our animal populations are healthy and that they are continuously renewed so that there will be healthy populations in fifty and a hundred years’ time. This means that populations must be continuously renewed through breeding – new generations must replace previous generations. One consequence of this is that surpluses sometimes arise, which you then have to deal with.
Example: If you need to have 100 animals to maintain a healthy and viable population, it is important that these 100 animals have the right gender distribution and are genetically healthy, i.e. not damaged by inbreeding. Every year some animals die, either from old age, disease or injury. It’s a natural dynamic. But in order to maintain the population of a hundred animals, animals need to be added, and that can only be done through breeding. For example, let’s say that one year 7 animals die, 3 males and 4 females. In order to maintain the balance of the population, we need to make sure that the following year the same number of animals with the same gender distribution are added. This is done by breeding. But you can’t just do it by letting 7 females breed and then “order” 3 males and 4 females. It’s far from certain that all 7 females will even get pregnant. And if they do become pregnant, it is far from certain that they will complete the pregnancy and give birth to a baby each. And even if this were to happen, it is not certain that all 7 pups will survive the first difficult time, and it is far from certain that the gender distribution will be exactly what we want, in this case 3 males and 4 females. So, to be sure of having 3 males and 4 females available for the next generation, we will have to let more females breed and then hope that among the resulting offspring there will be at least 3 males and 4 females that we can breed with.
The consequence of this is that there will inevitably be a surplus that we have to deal with. In many cases, we will be able to send it to other zoos that are in need of those particular individuals. But in some cases, especially for species that breed really well in zoos, it’s not possible to send them elsewhere. That would just be shifting the problem and inflicting a surplus on them. In those cases, we take responsibility and euthanize the surplus animals, either because they have the wrong genetic makeup, or because they are of the wrong sex – or simply because they are in excess.
The killing of surplus animals is not a result of doing nothing, but a natural consequence of serious management of the animal populations we deal with.
On top of that, it is wrong to take away the animals’ breeding behavior (if we chose to stop breeding anyway to avoid surplus). If we prevent them from breeding at natural intervals, we are also depriving them of a large part of their natural behavior, and that will mean reduced welfare – simply because we think we can’t take lives, as society does on a daily basis to a much greater extent than in zoos.
Another option would be to use contraception – still if we wanted to limit breeding despite the problem for future generations. But we must not forget that using contraception is by no means unproblematic. On the one hand, it causes physiological problems in animals that we don’t see from the outside, but which have a major impact on their daily lives (kidney problems, liver problems, etc.), and on the other hand, it has been shown that in many cases the use of contraception is not reversible, as is the case with humans. Once you have used chemical contraception, similar to birth control pills in humans, fertility rarely returns when you stop using it. This is of course problematic for the population, as we are effectively castrating animals and thus significantly reducing the fertility of the population and thus destroying the possibility of having healthy populations in the future.
The killing of animals in zoos must therefore be considered a natural and necessary tool in the ongoing management of the animal population if the goal is to have a healthy animal population not only in the present, but also for many years to come. The number of animals killed in zoos is also far below the number of lives taken in society. The fact that these are exotic animals and not “just” production animals like pigs and cows should have no bearing on this. In all cases, we are talking about the killing of healthy animals. But it is done for a serious purpose – in agriculture to put food on the table and in zoos to ensure healthy animal populations long into the future.
