ODENSE, Denmark, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- A Danish zoo raised the ire of animal rights advocates by killing a young lion and dissecting him in front of a crowd of hundreds of children for education.
The Odense Zoo hosted an event at noon Thursday for hundreds of children and their parents to watch the young male lion being dissected.
The event, which was timed to coincide with a Danish school holiday, was billed by the zoo as an educational event.
"The reason we are dissecting it is that we believe there is a lot of education involved in dissecting a lion," Michael Wallberg Sorensen, a zookeeper at the Odense Zoo, told The Guardian.
Zoo guide Lotte Tranberg told the assembled crowd the lion had been killed several months ago because it had reached sexual maturity and officials were concerned about potential inbreeding.
"If we had allowed it to stay it could have mated, that is to say have cubs, with its own sisters and its own mother. And then you have what is called inbreeding," she was quoted as saying by The Local.
Wendy Higgins, a spokeswoman for the Humane Society International in Europe, condemned the zoo for "making a macabre spectacle out of a much deeper tragedy."
"My heart sinks at watching this magnificent animal reduced to a publicity stunt," Higgins tweeted.
The Copenhagen Zoo faced similar criticism in February 2014 when it killed and publicly dissected a giraffe.
