“Life and Other Problems”: New documentary asks: ‘Why did a zoo kill Marius, a healthy young giraffe?’
The documentary film uses the case of Marius to ponder the interconnectivity of species and life on Earth; the unity of living beings that links humans, giraffes, chimpanzees, orcas, flowers, trees and all organic substance. This can inspire us to protect individual animals, or perhaps we should think about our collective destiny as creatures embedded in a continuum of billions of years of evolutionary time.
MATTHEW CAREY: The story shocked the world 10 years ago: the Copenhagen Zoo’s decision to euthanize a healthy two-year-old giraffe named Marius because they considered it a “surplus animal.” CNN reported on it. So did Le Monde in France, the U.K.’s Guardian and The Independent, and the Irish Times. The New York Times wrote on February 9, 2014: “Marius the reticulated giraffe died at the Copenhagen Zoo on Sunday. He was 2 years old. The cause of death was a shotgun blast, and after a public autopsy, the animal, who was 11 feet 6 inches, was fed to the zoo’s lions and other big cats.”
A decade after the death of Marius, the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen hosted the world premiere of Life and Other Problems, a documentary that uses the case of Marius to ponder the interconnectivity of species, and life on Earth. The film is directed by Max Kestner, who asks deep “existential questions,” the CPH:DOX program observes: “What is life? Does consciousness exist? Where does love come from? And last but not least: How does it all fit together – like, really? With curiosity and an open mind, Kestner embarks on a philosophical journey around the world to find answers to his questions.”
Among the many people interviewed in the film are Bengt Holst, the Copenhagen Zoo’s scientific director who made the decision to put down Marius, despite offers from around the world (even from Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov) to adopt the animal. For Holst, it was a matter of principle. Marius’s genes were well represented in European zoos, he said, and the youngster (a two-year-old is a teenager in giraffe terms, Holst says in the documentary) had been rejected by his family because, Holst says, he was in effect taking up too many resources. If I interpreted him correctly, he believed keeping Marius alive was an unnatural act, because in the wild he would have been “selected out” in an evolutionary/Darwinian sense.
Animal rights activists accused Horst of callousness, and they inundated him with death threats. Kestner doesn’t take a prosecutorial approach in his documentary, either vis-à-vis Horst or his detractor-attackers. He wants to situate the debate in a vastly larger context. By interviewing experts in microbiology and other scientific fields, a sense emerges that we ought to consider that life amounts to a constant process of recycling and reorganizing of itself, from the level of cells on up…
The inspiration to do a documentary on the death of Marius and that story’s larger significance came from producer Vibeke Vogel. “I was so fascinated about the story and how, to me, it said so much about how we connect to other species,” Vogel told Deadline after the world premiere at the Grand Teatret in Copenhagen…
Underscoring that point, the director uses lines from John Donne’s extraordinary 17th century poem”For Whom the Bell Tolls” (voiced in the film by Orson Welles): “No man is an island/Entire of itself./Each is a piece of the continent,/A part of the main… Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind.”
The community of living beings (not just mankind) is part of the same continent, to borrow the Donne metaphor. We are a part of unity that links humans, giraffes, chimpanzees, orcas, flowers, trees and all organic substance. That can inspire us to protect individual animals, or perhaps we should think about our collective destiny as creatures embedded in a continuum of billions of years of evolutionary time. SOURCE…
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