A Danish zoo dissected a lion in front of a crowd of schoolchildren on Thursday.
The 9-month-old healthy female lion was killed along with two other cubs by the Odense Zoo in February.
Zoo officials said the lion was put down to prevent inbreeding, the New York Times reported. While zoos in the U.S. use contraceptives to control population size or prevent inbreeding, many zoos in Europe believe it's better for animals to be able to breed, even if it means killing some.
Last year, the Copenhagen Zoo was met with international backlash after it killed a 2-year-old giraffe and dissected it in public. Later that year, the same zoo killed four lions, but it did not publicly dissect them.
The zoo kept the lion's body in a freezer until the dissection took place Thursday, and specifically scheduled the event to coincide with Denmark's school holidays so children could attend.
"The reason we are dissecting it is that we believe there is a lot of education involved in dissecting a lion," Michael Wallberg Sorensen, a zookeeper at the Odense Zoo in central Denmark, told AFP beforehand.
