Second Danish zoo plans to kill young giraffe to stop inbreeding

Not again!

Despite the death threats and worldwide disgust when the Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark killed 2-year-old giraffe Marius to prevent inbreeding on Sunday, Feb. 9, a second zoo in the country plans to kill a giraffe -- and says it’s in the animal’s best interest.

The second giraffe, coincidentally also named Marius, lives at the Danish Jyllands Park Zoo. To make room for a female giraffe it plans to acquire, the zoo plans to put down its 7-year-old male, balancing out genders in the facility.

Why kill a giraffe?

Q: How did the zoo end up with a giraffe it couldn't keep?

A: Breeding groups in zoos are made up of a single bull and a group of females. Zoo's remove female offspring to prevent inbreeding, and males to prevent fighting.

Q: Aren't there other options?

A: Zoos could design new giraffe facilities, but many don't have that option. A young bull could theoretically be sent to an all-female group as stud, but experts prefer a larger, more mature male for that, and Marius didn't fit that bill.

Q: What about contraceptives or castration?

A: Yes and no. Until recently, either would have required sedation, which is a relatively high-risk operation with giraffes. They are liable to break their necks when they fall while sedated.

Read more about the zoo's policies here

“We can't have two males and one female. Then there will be fights,” zoo keeper Janni Lojtved Poulsen told Danish news agency Ritzau. “If the breeding program coordinator decides that he should be put down, then that's what we'll do,” Poulsen said.

The first Marius was killed because his genes were already well represented in the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, which aims to maintain biodiversity and didn’t want an excess of similar genes. Despite an online petition arguing that the zoo should spare his life, Marius was shot in the head -- according to European zoo-keeping guidelines -- before being butchered and fed to lions.

Will the second Marius face a similar fate? It might be possible for the zoo to find another place for the giraffe to live, Reuters reported, but the probability of that is small. Like the first Marius, the Jyllands Park giraffe is considered unsuitable for breeding.

Poulsen defended the zoo’s plans, despite the widespread disgust of animal lovers.

“Many places abroad where they do not do this, the animals live under poor conditions, and they are not allowed to breed either. We don't think that's OK,” she said.

'We can't have two males and one female. Then there will be fights.'

- Zoo keeper Janni Lojtved Poulsen

The Jyllands Park Zoo has not said whether it will have a public dissection of its Marius similar to the one held at the Copenhagen Zoo.

The watchdog group Animal Rights Sweden said the plight of Marius underscores what it believes zoos do to animals regularly.

"It is no secret that animals are killed when there is no longer space, or if the animals don't have genes that are interesting enough," the group said in a statement. "The only way to stop this is to not visit zoos."

"When the cute animal babies that attract visitors grow up, they are not as interesting anymore.”

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Experts: Media May Be Second Prison for Cleveland Abductees

Three women kept captive in a boarded-up Cleveland house for between nine and 11 years will likely face a long road to recovery after their nightmarish ordeal.

The women, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, all went missing between 2002 and 2004, when they were teens, or in Knight's case, 20 years old. The women managed to escape on Monday (May 6). Police told reporters this week that they had found chains and ropes in the house, and that the women were very rarely allowed outside into the backyard. Berry's 6-year-old daughter also escaped from the house. 

Former school bus driver Ariel Castro has been charged with kidnapping and rape in the case.

The women's families told CNN that they were in good spirits upon being reunited with their families, but social scientists warn that the trauma of captivity is not likely to fade overnight — especially as they will have to recover in the public eye, under media pressure. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

"The big challenge that they face is the anticipation that everything is going to be perfect once family members are back together again," said Geoffrey Greif, a professor of social work at the University of Maryland who has studied missing and exploited children.

Recovering from trauma

In fact, Greif said, the women's families have changed in the decades they have been gone. Berry's mother, Louwana Miller, died in 2006 without ever finding out what had happened to her daughter.

 "The family grows, changes in one direction," Greif told LiveScience. "The women change in a different direction, and the issue is to accept the fact that their life trajectories have been very different."

At the same time, the abducted women are likely to suffer with the aftereffects of trauma, said pediatric and adolescent psychologist Carolyn Landis of University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland. This could include post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

"I think of it as somebody who has been through a war," Landis told LiveScience. Symptoms of PTSD could include re-experiencing the trauma, anxiety, nightmares, insomnia and even physical ailments.

Coping in the aftermath

Therapy and possibly medications could help ease PTSD symptoms, Landis said. It's also important that the women face their recoveries individually. The three might face different struggles and different paths despite sharing similar traumas.

Abduction victims often feel guilt and shame, questioning themselves about whether they did enough to escape, Greif said. They might also compare themselves with individuals from other high-profile cases.

"From talking to other people who have been kidnapped and recovered, they sometimes measure themselves against the perception of how high-profile former abducted people do," Greif said. "It can set a bar that may have worked for Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard, but may not work for someone else."

Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at age 14 from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah, and held for nine months. Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted at age 11 in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., and was kept in captivity for 18 years.

Like Berry, Dugard had children in captivity. Berry's child may need psychological help as well, Landis said.

"I would expect that it probably wasn't a wonderful atmosphere, so I'm sure she might have heard or seen things that would not be typical for your normal child," she said. "I would expect she might have symptoms of PTSD as well."

The women's sudden celebrity may also complicate their recovery, Landis said. Dugard's memoir, "A Stolen Life" (Simon & Schuster, 2011) discusses not being able to go out with her daughters in public, lest they be recognized.

"I hope that people will give them their space and their privacy so they can live normal lives, because if not it's almost like they're still in a prison," Landis said.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Leap Second Science: NASA Explains Earth's Longer Day Today

Today will be one second longer than usual, and we have the moon to thank for the extra time.

A "leap second" will be added to the world's official clocks this evening (June 30), to account for the fact that Earth's rotation is slowing ever so slightly — meaning our days are getting longer, at the rate of about 1.4 milliseconds every 100 years.

"At the time of the dinosaurs, Earth completed one rotation in about 23 hours," Daniel MacMillan, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. "In the year 1820, a rotation took exactly 24 hours, or 86,400 standard seconds. Since 1820, the mean solar day has increased by about 2.5 milliseconds."

It's happening because of tidal forces between the Earth and moon. This mutual gravitational jostling results in the transfer of our planet's rotational momentum to the moon, pushing it away from us at about 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) per year.

Earth's rotational slowdown won't stop until it becomes tidally locked to the moon, researchers say — meaning we will always show the same face to our celestial neighbor. The moon is tidally locked to Earth now, keeping its far side forever out of sight. [Hit Snooze: 10 Best Alarm Clocks]

Scientists figured out the planet's lagging rotation rate using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. VLBI measures how long it takes radio waves emitted by faraway active black holes called quasars — the brightest objects in the universe — to reach a network of telescopes set up around the world.

From the tiny differences in arrival times to these various instruments, researchers can calculate Earth's rotational speed and a number of other interesting characteristics about our planet and its path through space.

Decades ago, scientists realized that some measurements and technologies required more precise timekeeping than Earth's rotation could provide. So in 1967, they officially changed the definition of a second, basing it on measurements of electromagnetic transitions in cesium atoms rather than the length of a day.

Such "atomic clocks" are accurate to approximately one second in 200 million years, researchers say. The widely used time standard based on the cesium atom is called Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

Timekeepers add leap seconds to UTC every once in a while to square it up with another time standard that's based on Earth's day length. So June 30 will get an extra second just before 8 p.m. EDT (midnight GMT on July 1).

The master clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory will move to 7:59:60 p.m. EDT, or 23:59:60 UTC, before ticking over. In practice, this means that clocks in many systems will be turned off for one second, NASA researchers said.

Saturday's adjustment will mark the 25th time a leap second has been added since the practice was initiated in 1972. The most recent leap second was inserted on New Year's Eve of 2008.

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