These attitudes of anthropomorphism are permeating the culture suddenly.

Corporatization and urbanization have detached people from food production and fostered an artificial attitude of entitlement.

The moral self righteousness of feelgood advocacy allows lazy people to feel like they know better without having to go to the trouble of actually reading books. I had no idea there were so many experts on zoo management.

I have 2 small dogs and a cat. To me they are my family and I would choose their lives over anything. They sleep in my bed and i’ll always give them food from my own (if it is good for them).

I also love them more than I do most relatives bar my immediate family and would do anything for them.

This is what some of you are defending ?

The people ‘responsible’ for this Danish zoo should be shot, cut up to little pieces and fed to the lions.

Pure disgusting and sickening arrogance. I wouldn’t even spit on them if they were on fire.

This is one of those almost non-existent times when I honestly feel pure hate for someone.

@Liberal
“because they have no opportunity to hunt, lions in zoos do depend on humans killing perfectly healthy animals to feed them in order to live.”

I doubt all the zoo’s in the world kill giraffes whenever it is feeding time for the lions.

“lions cannot swallow giraffes or other animals whole, so the animal, no matter what species, HAS TO be ripped up in pieces in order to be digested.”

The lions don’t need humans with saws to cut their food for them. I’m sure they are very capable of doing it themselves.

@Liberal

Well going by that reasoning you could even say it is ok for the Chinese to kill cats & dogs for food.

You have made some good points, many of which I have taken on board. However, just one observation: your blog would never have been in Maltese, the reason being that the very existence of Maltese as anything remotely resembling a language is entirely down to the British who used it as: A) a means of keeping the masses ignorant; B) as a counterweight to the Italian influence and inevitable union with Italy at the time of the Risorgimento; C) to create a historical narrative linking Malta to Africa as opposed to Italy.

[Daphne – Not so. That all educated Maltese spoke Italian among themselves is entirely a myth. Those who spoke Italian did so because they were partly Italian or had strong Italian roots and familial connections. There was no earthly reason why any Maltese should or would have spoken Italian otherwise, given that Malta was never a colony of Italy and Italy had no strong presence here. We speak English because of the British presence over 160 years, and even so, relatively few Maltese do. There was a brief period when a few – very, very few – Maltese families began speaking Italian among themselves as a politico-cultural statement and nothing more. It was wholly artificial, and that’s exactly why it didn’t survive. If people really did speak Italian naturally as their mother tongue, they would still be doing so today. But they are not. Italian remains a foreign language, however well we speak it. It is a mother tongue to virtually no Maltese unless they actually do have an Italian parent. The proof of the pudding & c & c: where did all the native Maltese Italian speakers go, if we really all were speaking Italian? The native tongue of educated Maltese was always Maltese. Italian was never anything other than an affectation for a relatively brief period. If there had never been a British period and I somehow still wound up writing a blog, it would most definitely have been in Maltese because nobody in my family for the last few generations spoke Italian, but Maltese, and they were hardly uneducated, working-class or ‘rahlin’.]

Were it not for this artificial imposition, Maltese being as it was, a poor dialect much less capable of transformation into a language than other former dialects, would have remained the language of the scullery and Italian would have predominated as it has across the rest of the Italian peninsula where dialects much richer than Maltese formerly reigned supreme.

[Daphne – Maltese was never the language of the scullery. See above. The smartest families in Malta spoke Maltese as a mother tongue and still do, though they also speak English fluently and some less fluently. Italian is spoken as a learned third language. This is a historic fact. I think you will find that those families who spoke Italian at home did so during a very particular period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that they supported the Nationalist Party and were making a political statement. If Italian were truly their mother tongue, they would still be speaking it. We don’t change our mother tongue depending on the situation; we keep passing it on down the generations.]

Please make an effort to realise that you’re not making any sense.

You say that you have no problem with lions killing giraffes in the wild, but disapprove of feeding a giraffe to lions in a zoo because lions in zoos do not depend on humans killing a perfectly healthy and beautiful giraffe and ripping it to pieces in order to eat.

First off, I hope you realise that beauty is no justified criterion for deserving to live (although I wouldn’t be surprised if you disagreed).

Secondly, I hope you realise that because they have no opportunity to hunt, lions in zoos do depend on humans killing perfectly healthy animals to feed them in order to live.

Thirdly – and I know this is becoming absurd but apparently it needs to be said – lions cannot swallow giraffes or other animals whole, so the animal, no matter what species, HAS TO be ripped up in pieces in order to be digested.

If you don’t understand this, I give up.

Mmm ….having been involved (albeit a while ago) in the compilation of published material on the subject of eugenics, I believe I have acquired a reasonable understanding of its’ meaning. However, I don’t think our viewpoints are completely disparate – what you call surplus to requirements, I termed genetically redundant. And I use that term precisely because the keeper appears to have based his definition of requirements purely on a genetic basis ie. they had all the samples they needed of that particular gene pool. And this seems to be where the problem lies, because it is not a zoo’s exclusive remit to acquire the necessary genetic material for a networked breeding problem and then dispose arbitrarily of what they would view as genetic waste. The zoo simply had no need whatsoever of this animal (probably not enough space either), disposed of the creature in the most efficient and cheapest way possible and then proceeded to justify their actions on the basis that they had saturated their gene pool for this genotype and could not figure out what else to do with it. This smacks of many things but professionalism is not one of them

@Ian

If the lions & the giraffe where in the wild and there was NO human intervention then I would have had nothing against it.

But in this case neither the lions nor the giraffe where in the wild. The lions did not kill the giraffe, humans did.

The lions at the zoo are fed whatever they are fed and certainly do not depend on humans killing a perfectly healthy and beautiful giraffe and ripping it up to pieces in order to eat.

@Daphne

They could be African, Russian, Chinese, Indian or even American for all I care.

Anyway I’m not against them being rescued as long as it is limited to just that.