One afternoon last January, two years after staff members at the Copenhagen Zoo surprised many people by shooting a healthy young giraffe, dissecting it in public, and then feeding its remains to lions, another Danish zoo was preparing for a public dissection. Lærke Stange Dahl and Malene Jepsen—biology students in their early twenties and part-time guides at the zoo in Odense, Denmark’s third-largest city—sat at a table in the zoo’s education room. They were surrounded by skulls and skins, and by tanks containing live snakes and cockroaches. Fruit flies hovered, and crickets chirped. This is where the zoo greets school groups, and hosts team-building exercises, centered on rodent dissections, for Danish corporations.

The next morning, Dahl and Jepsen were scheduled to dissect a young lion in front of a family audience, as part of a weekend-long event called “Animals Inside Out.” The lion, which had been euthanized a year earlier, then kept in a freezer, was thawing nearby. It had been ruled surplus to the zoo’s needs. In 2014, a similar judgment had been made about the giraffe in Copenhagen, known as Marius; its death became a social-media sensation, created panic in the international zoo business, and revealed a proud Danish unfussiness about animal mortality. Although the practice of culling zoo animals—euthanizing them for reasons of population control—is not restricted to Denmark, the practice elsewhere tends to be hidden, if not denied. In Denmark, culled animals are viewed as educational opportunities, and as meat for other captive animals. (A headline at the time read: “Giraffe’s Killing in Copenhagen Reveals Zoos’ Dark Culling Practices.”)

The women were pleased to have been assigned the dissection. They had an open, earnest confidence, founded, in part, on two years spent leading zoo tours and narrating sea-lion feedings. But neither of them had dissected a mammal larger than a rat. So they had arranged a study session—bringing coffee, reference books, and a laptop whose screen image was now projected onto a wall, just above a stuffed lion. They had cued up a YouTube video of a previous lion dissection at Odense.

“It’s not really different from a rat, except the size,” Jepsen said.

“There’s more cutting,” Dahl said.

They were worried that the lion might not fully defrost before the morning. A colleague, passing through the room, reassured them that a lion’s breastbone was “easier to cut than ice cream just out of the freezer.”

The video showed an outdoor scene. Two zookeepers stood behind a table on which lay a dead lion, its legs in the air. A couple of hundred people, in winter clothing, watched from bleacher seating, with young children at the front. One of the zookeepers, in the tone of a kindergarten teacher, asked the children what they expected to see. A child called out, “Liver!”

As Dahl and Jepsen watched the video, they began to write an outline of their event. They would first need to say something about surplus animals and conservation: the Danes are mindful of maintaining a genetically varied stock of a species, and culling can help preserve that diversity. Then the women would cut into the lion, working from the tail to the head. “Intestines—what else do we meet on the way up?” Jepsen asked, holding a pencil in the air.

“We should definitely take the kidneys out, and the liver.”

“And the spleen,” Jepsen said, grudgingly, as if the organ were not important enough to be included in the dissection.

“Cut larynx off,” Dahl said, summarizing the end of the process. “Blow up lungs. Take out tongue. Cut off head.”

“Shall we take out the eye, if the kids are asking about it?” Jepsen said.

Dahl and Jepsen decided to check on the lion. Outside, it was cold and almost dark; un-Scandinavian birds squawked. We walked to a farmlike area of storage rooms and workshops. Here, two days earlier, I had seen the lion in a walk-in freezer, alongside trays of rats, a sitatunga, and a severed giraffe leg, upright in a corner. The lion, nine months old when it died, looked a little compressed by gravity and bloodlessness, and its fur had an infant paleness; it could have almost been a shorn sheep. A forklift had carried it across the yard.

Now it lay on a pallet on the concrete floor of a small, bare room that is normally used to prepare food for the zoo’s carnivores. Next door, there was a room packed with the remains of horses; the zoo had euthanized the animals after they were donated by members of the public. (These deliveries had peaked at the start of the year, suggesting that end-of-life decisions had been deferred until after Christmas.) The lion’s tongue was lolling out of its mouth, from which a few drops of viscous blood had spilled to the ground.

Jepsen pressed gently on its side with two hands, like someone shopping for a sofa.

“Oh, my God,” she said. There was almost no give.

She brought an air heater closer, while acknowledging a fear of cooking the flesh.

“As long as it doesn’t take us an hour just to get to the heart,” she said.

In 2014, not long after Marius, the giraffe, was shot in Copenhagen, a British zoo professional had a conversation with Bengt Holst, the Copenhagen Zoo’s scientific director and the public face of the zoo’s euthanization and dissection polices. As the Briton recently recalled, he began by asking Holst, “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Zoo directors in the United States and Europe have a recurring obligation, largely unknown to people who run art galleries and amusement parks, to explain to the public that their institutions deserve to exist, and aren’t sad, and will still exist in thirty years. The oddity, and arguable unkindness, of displaying animals that are prevented from doing much of what they do in natural settings—breeding, hunting, walking from here to there—has to be discussed and defended, even on days when public attention isn’t drawn to the issue, as it was by the death of Marius, or by the death, in May, 2016, of Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. Harambe was shot and killed after it picked up a three-year-old boy who had climbed inside its enclosure. The child recovered from his injuries. (Harambe has had a strange afterlife, as a shorthand joke about Internet sensations—a meme about memes.)

The modern defense of zoos tends to refer to four achievements: education, conservation, scientific research, and the societal benefit of getting people out of the house. Much of this is often packed into a single claim, which may be true even if it is unsupported by good evidence: zoos are said to cause people to value wild animals more than they otherwise would, thereby improving the survival prospects of threatened species.

A modern zoo hopes to tell a story of refuge and empathy. So a giraffe’s dismemberment, observed by unsmiling children, suggested a counternarrative, and one that carried a particular risk of public-relations contagion. Giraffes are easy to like—in part for seeming so unassuming about their height advantage—and the international zoo industry couldn’t dismiss the Copenhagen Zoo as a renegade operation. Following Marius’s death, Holst, a sober-looking white-haired man in his early sixties, appeared frequently on television, talking steadily about education, conservation, and scientific research.