On a Sunday morning in February 2014, after a favourite breakfast of rye bread, 18-month-old giraffe Marius was killed with a penetrative captive bolt fired at his head by veterinary staff at Copenhagen zoo. His body was later cut up in front of a crowd of visitors that included several open-mouthed children, and then fed to the zoo’s lions.
Marius was neither dangerous nor ill. The zoo argued he had to die because his genes were too common for him to be suitable for breeding. Avoiding inbreeding, which is what Marius may have ended up doing as a grown male, was crucial to ensure the existence of a healthy giraffe population in European zoos, Copenhagen zoo’s scientific director, Bengt Holst, said at the time.
Marius’s death and public dismemberment sparked an international media storm. Protesters gathered outside the zoo, and Holst was inundated with hate mail and death threats, calling him a “killer” and a “monster” and likening his actions to those of Nazi Germany. Fox News prophesied that the kids who watched the autopsy would eventually turn into serial killers. The US ambassador to Denmark got involved.
Before Marius’s death sentence was carried out, several people got in touch with offers to take in the young giraffe, in some cases offering large sums of money in exchange: Yorkshire Wildlife Park, a Hollywood producer, Chechnya’s strongman leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Copenhagen zoo turned them all down.
“To appreciate how amazing these animals are, you need to also see them from the inside,” Holst says in a new documentary called Life and Other Problems, which premiered at the Copenhagen international documentary festival in March and is showing at the Chicago film festival next week. “You couldn’t do that in a lot of countries.”
The documentary’s director, Danish film-maker Max Kestner, has a degree of sympathy with his compatriots’ trenchantly rationalist and anti-Disney view of the natural world. “I felt that those who were arguing that we could not kill Marius were hypocritical, because I expected that most of them would go home and eat a cow,” he says in a video call from his home in Copenhagen.
But something still troubled him. “On the other hand, the scientific part of the discussion presented by the zoo said that this is not about a single animal, it’s about protecting the species. So we have to kill one animal to save others. But we don’t do that with humans. We protect the single human, not the species. It’s how our moral system functions.”
The film that Kestner ended up making does not try to answer whether killing Marius was right or wrong, or get bogged down in the ethics of zoo-keeping. Rather, it follows in the steps of other film-makers using the documentary form to re-evaluate the relationship between humans and animals: Craig Foster’s My Octopus Teacher (2020), Andrea Arnold’s Cow (2021), and Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’s Pepe (2024), which imagines the ghost of a hippopotamus from drug lord Pablo Escobar’s private menagerie returning to tell its story.
“It was an attempt to understand this situation not in a moral way, but as a scientific problem,” says Kestner. “I believe in science, you could say it’s my religion since I don’t have another one. So I asked my religion – science – what it can tell us about ‘What is life?’ and ‘How do we understand life as a phenomenon?’ These questions reflected a confusion within myself. So that’s why I started making the film.”
What Kestner discovers is a double standard in the way we perceive the purpose of animals’ existence compared with human life. The evolutionary arms race between co-evolving genes is what is seen to determine the life or death of Marius the giraffe, but not that of Max the film-maker. If humans were purely animated by evolution, he reflects at one point in the film, the oldest two of his three children would have long moved out of the family home and “evolutionally speaking, I’ll be redundant … Yet we don’t live in nature, so they’re still with me.”
One way some scientists justify this double standard is that human life is distinctly different from non-human life, because we are conscious of our own consciousness. But the more Kestner tries to firm up that distinction, the more it unravels. He speaks to the British naturalist and author Charles Foster, who tells him that he works with many biologists who have dedicated their entire scientific careers to proving that consciousness in animals is an illusion. “Then they come home, look their dog in the eye and know he is conscious,” Foster says.
As Kestner speaks to zoologists, biologists, and even volcanologists about the nature of consciousness, the distinction between human and non-human breaks down further and further. Not only neurons and nervous systems have the ability to process information, one scientist tells him, but every cell in your body.
Life and Other Problems isn’t a film that wants to hit its viewers over the head with its conclusion, but by the end of Kestner’s film it is clear that he takes as much issue with the strictly evolutionist view that determined Marius’ fate as with the Disneyfication of the animal world. Most of the scientists he speaks to conclude that not only natural selection, but relationships and interconnectedness are what is key to life – of humans, animals, plants, fungi, even microbes.
At the end of the film, Kestner goes fishing with naturalist Foster and evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev. As they string their fishing rods, Kestner asks whether they believe in a “life force” or a higher purpose. “I don’t know,” says Willerslev. “But if it’s all about survival of the fittest and reproduction – if this is really how it works – what a horrible Earth we’re living on.”
“If one of your children died you wouldn’t be worried that your genes weren’t progressing to the next generation,” Foster adds. “You don’t look for that purpose in your balls.”
Life and Other Problems is showing at the Chicago film festival from 20 October
