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Four-Day-Old Baby Orangutan Needlessly Killed at Switzerland's Basel Zoo

From Marc Bekoff
February 2023

Deciding to kill otherwise healthy individuals really is not complicated at all. Zoos should not kill healthy animals, and if zoo management practices “require” the killing of healthy animals, then these practices need to change. Right now, today.

Image: Brett Jordan, Pexels

This is to alert people to what happened at the Basel Zoo this week. Many people don't know what happened and many have asked me to write something so that a wider audience would know. More information can be found here—Zoo Basel puts baby orangutan to sleep–now a shitstorm is raging.

A baby Orangutan was killed—not euthanized—at the Basel Zoo after her mother, Revital, died. This is a case of "zoothanasia" as I call it, because killing the baby was not done as a mercy killing because she was suffering from interminable pain or from an incurable disease—she wasn't. The zoo decided the baby wouldn't live or have a quality life because she was motherless. This claim is unfounded. Shame on them.

Killing the baby is ethically indefensible no matter what zoo administrators say. This is not a "radical animal rights" position but rather all about decency and respect for the life of every single individual—the baby should not have been killed. And, of course, the mother should never have been impregnated.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.

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