Denmark — land of delightful fairy tales, modish wood furniture and Senator Bernie Sanders’s favorite health care system — is once again the target of international opprobrium over its treatment of zoo animals.

On Thursday, staff members at a zoo in Odense, the country’s third-largest city, publicly dissected the corpse of a 9-month-old lion in front of an audience including children. The lion, a healthy female, was put to death in February after the zoo sought in vain to find her another home.

The move comes more than a year after another Danish zoo, in Copenhagen, generated global outrage when it killed a healthy 2-year-old giraffe named Marius, ostensibly to reduce the risk of inbreeding, before dissecting him and feeding him to lions. At that time, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals projected a giant lit-up message at the zoo’s entrance, saying: “Zoos are animal prisons: You paid the ticket, Marius paid with his life.”

The plans by the Odense Zoo to publicly dissect the lion — to coincide with a school break for Danish students — had provoked anger on social media, which erupted in outrage over the summer after an American dentist shot and killed a black-maned lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe in July.