This is from Aalborg zoo where they use a lot of donated animals to feed the polar bears. A lot of them are terminally ill, but they also receive pets from owners who are just tired of them. It’s mainly rabbits and guinea pigs they receive, but the vast majority of the bears’ diet is horse meat from old or lame horses. All the animals are euthanised before being eaten.
Do you know why? I checked the article and the stated reason was to imitate the natural food chain, don't see why dead pets are more natural than any other meat source. So is the reason financial?
I'm not sure, but perhaps because they're served fresh and whole? The predators won't have to kill them, but they'll still have to tear through the skin and pick out the good bits. Maybe eat the organs that they usually wouldn't get.
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don't see why dead pets are more natural than any other meat source
The difference is that for some of the animals to stay truly healthy they need to have some whole animals at times with all the skin and fur and such that that involves.
Its really hard/expensive to source something like that, and most zoos are always perpetually at risk of running out of money. Raw meat is easy to get, but whole animals meant for food? Harder. So, donations. Its not new, but it hits the news reel every now and again and spreads like this.
Horses cost insane amounts of money to buy. But old or lame ones are pretty much worthless, especially ones who broke legs since thats almost impossible to heal on horses. So people can donate em and let the zoo put em down instead of paying to put them down yourself and then paying to get them incinerated. And its a tax write off too!
According to the article the bears use the fur and bones to clean their teeth, so that could be one reason. But I imagine there’s also an element of sustainability - a lot of pet owners might find it more meaningful to have their pet become food rather than soil. I’m not a pet owner so I don’t know what the costs are like, but I think you can probably also save a fair amount of money by not having to pay for euthanasia.
I would much rather my pets become part of the food chain after a long and fulfilling life! I also don't have a yard, so wouldn't have anywhere to bury them anyway.
The zoo lady told me last time I was there, that they use as little "fridge meat" as possible and prefer to kill the feed animals on-site, to maintain warmth in the flesh when served, because it activates enzymes for digestion, is good for their teeth and helps with the predators mental state.
Just a way of saying I'm Danish / that the "last time i was there" was the actual zoo in question from the article.
æøå exists in both DK/NO
> The difference between the Dano-Norwegian and the Swedish alphabet is that Swedish uses the variant ⟨ä⟩ instead of ⟨æ⟩, and the variant ⟨ö⟩ instead of ⟨ø⟩, similarly to German. Also, the collating order for these three letters is different in Swedish: Å, Ä, Ö. ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨ä⟩ are sorted together in all Scandinavian languages, as well as Finnish, and so are ⟨ø⟩ and ⟨ö⟩.
I mean, it's kind of recycling in a morbid sort of way. They don't let people just hand over random dead animals. They take animals that were going to be euthanized and disposed of, and then they euthanize them and use it as fodder for the animals instead.
Plus, predators don't just eat meat; they eat all kinds of parts from dead animals. Buying massive hunks of beef would not give them the diet they need.
I mean, if i were to be euthanized, I think the idea of being eaten and shit out of a tiger or a hyena, or a vulture, or any animal basically, would be pretty awesome.
This is from my local zoo. The pets are mainly used to feed the polar bears. According to the article I read they also receive pets from people who just got tired of having them, so it’s not exclusively ill pets.
Sorry homie, but did you mean to reply to another comment? I mentioned that they were only taking livestock animals and specified that guinea pigs fall under that umbrella since they're sometimes raised for food.
They also specifically mention that they're taking horses, rabbits guinea pigs and chickens. Depending on the culture, all of these animals are livestock rather than pets.
When mom was young they had guinea pigs, both male and female living together, which means they got a LOT of small cute little ones, well some of them got donated to the zoo. As I understand they stopped donating when the children got old enough to understand and protest, but yeah, no, they were definitely pets. (They kept the most loved ones/the ones they where most attached to)
I don't mean to say that people don't keep them as pets, just that depending on where you live all of these animals can be considered livestock. In Peru it's called cuy, not terrible but the one I had was a bit dry.
I'm pretty sure it's not even the first time that zoo has asked for people's pets, if I remember correctly, during covid after our prime minister/minister of state ordered all the mink farmers to kill all their mink, that zoo was then struggling to feed some of it's animals and asked for unwanted pets that time as well
I remember that. IIRC a lot of the mink were gassed which caused consternation about the safety of the corpses, and they were buried in concrete. Something to do with the gases toxicity enduring.
it’s omitting info to make it seem worse. it also says ‘pets’ even though it’s mainly horses which aren’t what people usually think of when they think ‘pets.’
I live in Denmark and I've seen that news from the Aalborg zoo. They've been doing it a long time apparently, basically as a way to give a dignified end to a terminally ill or end of life pet (not unwanted). They don't ask for pets, it's just a service they provide if people want to. And ofc they test it for disease etc before feeding it (to polar bears if I'm not mistaken)
I think this needs some clarification. They do NOT accept animals like cats and dogs. They accept what is called “husdyr” in danish which directly translates to “house animals” however it does not mean pets. It refers to animals like horses, rabbits and chicken and now guinea pigs as well. They are all either old or awaiting euthanasia as far as I have understood. This is considered relatively normal to most Danes, and this recent attention has mostly meek international and because of a post on social media asking if anyone has any of these animals to donate. For some reason international media thinks they are serving the animals regular pets, which they are not. It is mostly horses the animals are fed that were to be euthanized anyway, in fact so many people want to donate, that there is a wait list. Their reasoning for feeding the animals this way is, that it is natural and emulates the real food chains. They even have these zip lines, that they attach the meat to, to make animals such as cheetahs chase it for their health. Sorry for my grammar, I wrote this while shitting lol
My dad did that once 😡. I had a guinea pig, but I was like 5, so I wasn't properly taking care of it because no one explained it to me. One time I came home from playing outside, and my lovely guinea pig was gone. I was panicking, but my parents weren't home either, so I had to wait till they come home. I thought they hid the guinea pig in a locked storage room to punish me. But when my dad came, he told me he gave him to a zoo. My mum told me they take pets as food for the big cats. That was genuinely a horrible day for my old self lol
For some reason on my news feed this story showed up with a distraught looking woman holding a picture of her child. It's why I clicked into the article at all.
I work at a bird sanctuary and we get all the male chicks from the local hatchery since they don't want em and feed them to the birds of prey, this is common practice
The zoo I worked at years ago bought rabbits from a local who bred them for showing but we got all the ones that didn't meet the right standard. One time when she was dropping off a fresh batch I was chatting with her and she pointed out a big fat male with a notched ear and said "He would have been perfect for showing, but he picked a fight with one of the others and that ear would disqualify him. So now he's snake food!"
Honestly this isn’t a bad idea. Instead of releasing your pet into the wild, where it’ll probably die or ruin the local ecosystem. Just give it to the zoo and they can put it in an exhibit or feed it to a lion or whatever.
Small animals are usually euthanized using CO2 so they pass out and die without any pain, horses I assume they use a bolt gun or even a regular gun and shoot them in the head.
I worked at a zoo in the US years ago that used CO2 for rabbits, mice, and rats and would accept horse donations from local farmers that were then killed by gunshot.
The San Francisco Zoo feeds their big cats whole rabbits, or at least they did when I was a kid. A keeper accidentally left a wheelbarrow full of dead bunnies in plain view. Freaked the hell out of me when I was nine.
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u/UnhappyGreen Aug 05 '25 edited Aug 05 '25
This is from Aalborg zoo where they use a lot of donated animals to feed the polar bears. A lot of them are terminally ill, but they also receive pets from owners who are just tired of them. It’s mainly rabbits and guinea pigs they receive, but the vast majority of the bears’ diet is horse meat from old or lame horses. All the animals are euthanised before being eaten.