Dissection display not your normal day at the zoo with the kids

 

The smell seems to be the hardest thing to take for the children at Odense Zoo. Photo / AP

My 3-year-old daughter is transfixed by a bandage tied around the lion's rear shin, there to hide the spot where the zoo has cut away a strip of fur from the ligaments in advance.
"It's got a big plaster," Eira says over and over again. "Little lion, little lion. It's got a big plaster."
A female lion lies stretched out on the wooden table in front of us, ready for dissection, and the air is filled with the dull reek of dead meat.
I have taken her to Odense Zoo because I wanted to see how my daughter reacted to something that, for Danes, is completely normal and educational, but for foreigners seems so strange. My only worry is that Eira might be too young, not to handle the blood and gore, but to sit and watch for an hour. But as soon as the zoo worker, Rasmus, begins the demonstration, she stops squirming and begins to watch intently.
Rasmus cuts off the tongue. His colleague, Lotte, holds it up and starts scraping it close to a microphone so the crowd can hear how rough it is to touch.

Eira grins and sticks out her own tongue and starts rubbing it with a finger.
Lotte brings out a lion's skull and demonstrates how the teeth are adapted to puncture and rip the skin of its prey. "Big jaws. Roar! Lion going to bite you," Eira exclaims.
Rasmus removes the plaster and fur and pulls the two tendons he had exposed earlier to show the crowd how lions can extend their claws to form hooks that dig into the hide of their prey.
He cuts into the lion's abdomen, shearing through the fat in its inner thighs. "Lion don't want to cut," Eira says. "There's blood coming there."
The lion was put down several months ago, so when Rasmus opens up the abdomen you can really smell it. The children in front of us cover their noses. I start retching and, as far as I can see, I'm the only person who is affected so badly.
Rasmus unravels the lion's colon and Lotte and another zoo assistant hold it out, stretching it to at least 5m. They then tip out the contents of the lion's stomach to reveal the sodden fur of its last meal. By the time Rasmus pulls out the liver and kidneys, there's blood and guts all over the table.
But there's still little sign of alarm from Eira. On the contrary, she is starting to look bored and hungry. I decide to rush out and refuel at the zoo cafe, where she wolfs down some overpriced frikadeller.
I later ask Rasmus if he thinks children as young as Eira risk being traumatised by dissections. He shakes his head. "It's more cruel if you just walk into a supermarket and see all the cuts of different meats and all the organs that are lying there from different animals," he says.
Can they learn anything, though? "Different children and adults will learn different stuff, but they all take some interesting information home with them."
I do wonder a little if this applies to Eira, too. On the train home, I ask her what happened. "Lion fall down on table and got a plaster," she says.