A zoo in Denmark is asking people to donate their unwanted pets, particularly chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs but also horses if they are small, to help them feed the zoo’s predators.
The request created a backlash online, but the zoo said that “The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and are afterwards used as fodder” and that the purpose of the program is to make sure “nothing goes to waste — and [to] ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being of our predators,” according to the zoo’s website.

Obviously everything here is wrong – the fact that zoos still exist, the fact that pets still exist, the fact that some pets are unwanted, that zoos ask people who have unwanted “pets” to donate them to feed other animals, the fact that this Danish zoo could seriously make the following statement: “In zoos, we have a responsibility to imitate the animals’ natural food chain — for reasons of both animal welfare and professional integrity” – but we wish to focus on something else.
Animal activists are shocked that people are shocked by this zoo seriously proposing to bring unwanted animals as food for animals in zoos because they are “pets”, even though it is feeding animals that can’t do otherwise, and while the protesters themselves eat chickens and rabbits even though they really don’t have to. So the activists are shockingly pointing out the double standards of the online protesters.

But the shock should be that animal activists are still shocked by the double standards and irrationality of humans.
We saw similar online outcries when a giraffe was executed in another Danish zoo to feed other animals in the zoo a few years ago, and of course in cases like Cecil the lion, or when an animal manages to escape the slaughterhouse.
Some activists claim that these kind of cases set as an indication that humans care about animals and just need information and guidance. But it’s actually the opposite. For example, and directly related to this case, humans know that some animals in zoos need meat to survive and that all of them don’t, yet that’s not enough for them to acknowledge the hypocrisy and double standards in their shock. Obviously, it’s not that simple, since here it’s very tangible, as humans are asked to bring an animal they raised themselves to be killed and fed to another animal. But this is just another indication of how irrational humans are and how untrustworthy they are when it comes to moral issues. Humans do have all the information they need for them to change their habits, they just choose not to. If anything, these specific cases of supposed caring for nonhuman animals function as fig leaf and as moral licensing to be carless about the fate of the animals directly tortured for them.

Any animal would prefer to live as a “pet” and be killed by a veterinarian in a zoo over being imprisoned in a factory farm and be murdered in a slaughterhouse by a slaughterer. But it’s not about the animals and how they feel, but about humans and how they feel. It always has been and always will be. That is unless animal activists would stop being shocked by what is shocking humans and what doesn’t, and what motivates humans to change their cruel habits and what doesn’t, and start acting to change the reality of animals regardless of humans’ willingness to change.