‘Educational’ Danish zoo cuts up another lion in front of kids

A controversial Danish zoo dissected another lion for a public audience last weekend — despite widespread worldwide outrage a few months ago for pulling the same stunt.

People of all ages — many of them young children in the front row — ogled Saturday as the Odense Zoo sliced open a dead lion as part of an educational session.

“We think this gives our guests a different kind of education in which we show, rather than just tell, people what is inside a lion or whatever animal we choose,” Zoologist Nina Collatz Christensen told The Local. “You can compare yourself to the animals and find similarities and differences instead of just looking in a book.”

October’s dissection of a one-year-old lion brought national media attention to the small zoo in Denmark, which claimed the practice is a “normal,” has been going on for 20 years, and helps the zoo deal with “surplus animals.”

Christensen isn’t sure why there was so much outrage, but conceded that the practice would never fly in America.

“This would be something that could really cause problems for zoos in the US, the UK and even the Netherlands, which one thinks of as a very open-minded country,” she told the site.