On Friday, the Copenhagen zoo received two offers from other zoos willing to take Marius. But one, a zoo in the UK, already had an ample supply of Marius’s genetic line, and accepting him would mean denying room to a giraffe with less well-represented set of genes. The other, in southern Sweden, offered no guarantee that Marius would not later be sold elsewhere.

About 15 people gathered outside the zoo when it opened this morning to protest the giraffe’s death. After he was killed, technicians performed an autopsy for research purposes that was open to the public, before breaking down the body to be served to its carnivores. Although the operation lasted for well over three hours, Holst said, many parents and their children stayed and watched the whole thing. Their fascination with learning about giraffe anatomy—how big the animals’ hearts are, or how they have the exact number of vertebrae in their long necks as humans do in their short ones—reinforces his sense that the zoo acted properly.