Many of us have pets. More importantly, many of us love our pets. Be they cats, dogs, hamsters, lizards, or any other kind of critter, pets provide their owners with endless love, fun, and no small amount of irritation. So when the inevitable happens and a pet dies, the grief can be devastating. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals even dedicates a section of its website to pet bereavement, and services like Paws to Listen and Friends at the End exist solely to support people facing the loss of a companion animal. All this is to say that, for many of us, pets are not simply creatures that we own; they are members of the family.
Perhaps it’s this deep attachment that explains the public backlash to a recent appeal from Denmark’s Aalborg Zoo. The zoo asked people to donate unwanted pets so they could be used to feed its predators. As per the call, the zoo put out on Instagram reads:
Did you know that you can donate smaller pets to Aalborg Zoo?
Chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs form an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild 🐾
In zoos, we have a responsibility to imitate the animals’ natural food chain – for the sake of both animal welfare and professional integrity 🤝
If you have a healthy animal that needs to be removed for various reasons, you are welcome to donate it to us. The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and then used as food. That way, nothing goes to waste – and we ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being of our predators ♻️💕
Now, it should be noted here that the zoo does not accept cats or dogs as donations (although one might reasonably ask why). But, in addition to the small animals listed above, it does accept horses. And despite the recent attention the program has received, it is not new; the zoo has been accepting unwanted animals for years. It is simply that this most recent call has caught the media’s attention.
The response was swift. The zoo had to shut down the comments on its Facebook call due to the volume of angry and even abusive replies. Yet, as noted in the call itself, the reason the zoo is seeking these pets is not inherently or even obviously malicious. As the post itself explained, the program is not designed to be cruel. Predators in captivity thrive when their environment, including their diet, mimics what they would experience in the wild. In nature, the predators wouldn’t be eating neatly butchered, boneless meat; they would be consuming whole prey, bones, skin, fur, and organs included. The zoo’s aim, it says, is to provide this more natural diet for the benefit of the animals in its care, not to harm the animals that are donated.
And, for clarity, the donated animals are euthanised before being given to predators. They are not released alive into enclosures, so concerns about them suffering while hunted don’t apply in this case.
Even so, many people find the idea of feeding former pets to zoo animals unsettling. The question is “Why?” Is our discomfort just an instinctive reaction that we should learn to set aside in the name of animal welfare? Or is there a deeper, ethically significant reason for our unease?
On one hand, the case for Aalborg Zoo’s policy is straightforward: it prevents waste. If an animal is going to die anyway, its body could either be cremated or left to rot — or it could feed the zoo’s predators. This isn’t a choice between life and death for the animal; it’s a choice between disposal and purposeful use. Framed in such practical terms, the answer seems obvious: if you care about animals, you might choose the option that benefits another living creature, even if it means accepting that a lynx ate your beloved guinea pig.
On the other hand, there’s an argument rooted not in utility but in symbolism and empathy. By turning pets into food, critics say, we devalue their existence and our relationship with them. As Clifford Warwick, a UK-based consultant biologist and medical scientist, told The Guardian, “It further devalues the lives of pets … It’s a horrendous devaluation of animal life.” He follows this up with a succinct illustration: “Are you really happy saying: ‘OK, well Rex or Bruno, the time has come, there’s a hungry lion at the local zoo. Bye, off you go.’” In short, if pets are more to us in life than mere sacks of meat, they should mean more to us in death as well.
I find this objection difficult to fully accept. We already know the pet is going to die; what happens to the body afterward shouldn’t be more upsetting than the death itself. To focus on the fate of the remains rather than the loss of life seems misplaced.
There’s also the ecological reality: animals eat other animals. It’s not a moral failing, but how many species survive. Whether a zoo predator eats a former pet or a cow bred for slaughter, the act itself is the same. If the pet was going to die regardless, why object to its body sustaining another life?
What’s more, I’d be curious to know how many critics of this policy are vegan or vegetarian. If you continue to eat meat, thereby directly contributing to the death of animals, it seems inconsistent — if not outright hypocritical — to condemn the zoo for doing something that arguably reduces waste. In Denmark, according to the Vegan Society, vegetarians make up only about 3% of the population. For the rest, dietary choices already cause far greater harm to animals than Aalborg Zoo’s policy. And while vegetarian and vegan rates vary around the world, I would feel confident in saying there are far more meat eaters than those who subsist on a purely plant-based diet.
Ultimately, I think the outrage may have less to do with harm and more to do with cultural categories. As Haidt, Koller, and Dias noted back in 1993, we sort animals into moral boxes: pet (not for eating), livestock (fine for eating), vermin (kill on sight). These labels are arbitrary, yet they strongly shape our reactions. A rat and a rabbit are not inherently different in moral worth, but the label we assign determines whether we nurture or exterminate them. Blindly accepting these categories without reflection doesn’t protect animals — it just reinforces our own biases.
So the real question is this: if your pet had to be put down, would you let its death be the end, or would you allow it to help another animal live?
