Overview

• Tiergarten Nürnberg shot twelve healthy Guinea baboons in transport crates with single bullets to address an enclosure overcrowded with over 40 animals in a space built for 25.
• Zoo officials say years of failed transfer offers and ineffective contraception left them no humane alternative for population control.
• Animal rights groups and private citizens filed over 100 criminal complaints, prompting the Staatsanwaltschaft Nürnberg-Fürth to open a formal investigation.
• Activists staged protests in the days before the cull, chaining themselves to fences and glueing their hands to entrances in an effort to halt the shootings.
• Other North Rhine-Westphalia zoos describe culling as a last-resort policy after exhausting transfers and birth control, but the Nuremberg case is now at the center of a national debate over zoo population management.