Surplus Lives: When Conservation Has Too Many Animals

There is something almost admirable about the clarity of the announcement: in March 2026, Zürich Zoo euthanized ten healthy gelada baboons. Not sick, not dying, not suffering – just inconveniently “too many.” The official explanation gestures toward “tensions in the group” and a “lack of space” elsewhere, as if the animals themselves had irresponsibly overbooked their accommodations. One might almost forget that every aspect of their existence – breeding, grouping, enclosure size – is meticulously planned by the very institution that now presents their deaths as an unfortunate necessity.

Of course, we are not supposed to call it killing. We are supposed to say the baboons were “euthanized,” a word that arrives pre-softened, padded with the suggestion of mercy (a “good death”). But there is something Orwellian about extending this term to young, healthy animals who simply no longer fit into a management plan.

In this case, most of the baboons killed were juveniles, which adds a certain bleak efficiency to the whole affair: better to remove the excess early, before it becomes even more logistically awkward. One imagines the survivors adjusting, as they must, to the sudden disappearance of group members – an emotional dimension politely omitted from institutional press releases.

The explanation, when one looks at it closely, is almost too honest. Zoos face “structural problems” in managing captive populations. The artificial conditions of captivity make it impossible to replicate natural social structures, so groups grow, tensions arise, and space runs out. And so, inevitably, some animals become “surplus.” It is a striking word, really – borrowed from economics, where it refers to excess production, unsold goods, inefficiencies in the system. Applied to living beings, it has a certain brutal honesty: these baboons were not individuals with lives; they were an overstock issue.

What makes this particularly unsettling is that none of it is accidental. Breeding in zoos is not an unfortunate side effect; it is actively encouraged. Animals reproduce because reproduction draws visitors, sustains the illusion of thriving populations, and signals institutional success. Yet the long-term space required for these growing populations is, apparently, a secondary consideration. The gelada group in Zürich was allowed to expand to 48 individuals before the arithmetic of captivity caught up with it. At that point, the logic becomes unavoidable: if you cannot expand the space, you reduce the population. The phrase “planned population management” does a great deal of work here, quietly absorbing what might otherwise sound like a contradiction.

And all of this unfolds under the reassuring banner of “conservation.” Modern zoos have become remarkably adept at presenting themselves as guardians of biodiversity, institutions where education, research, and preservation converge. Visitors are invited to believe that their ticket purchases contribute to saving species, perhaps even the planet itself. It is a compelling narrative – who wouldn’t prefer their leisure activities to double as moral action? Yet the case of the geladas introduces a faint but persistent dissonance: these baboons are not endangered and there is no program to reintroduce zoo-bred individuals into the wild. Their lives begin and end entirely within the closed circuit of captivity.

Breeding animals only to later classify them as surplus and eliminate them is not conservation. It is, quite plainly, population control within an exhibition system. That this reality coexists so comfortably with the rhetoric of saving nature is less a paradox than a testament to how effective the narrative has become. If this were an isolated incident, one might be tempted to treat it as a regrettable anomaly – but it is not. The killing of “surplus” animals is standard practice, a routine adjustment mechanism in the management of captive populations – similar measures were (in)famously taken with guinea baboons in Nürnberg in 2025, for example. What may be changing is not the practice itself, but its visibility. Zoos are increasingly willing to present these decisions as normal, even responsible. And perhaps they are right to do so. After all, the public response tends to be muted, limited to a handful of predictably outraged voices that can be easily dismissed as fringe.

Which leaves us with a quietly disheartening conclusion: the system functions exactly as intended. Animals are bred, displayed, managed, and, when necessary, removed. The language is carefully calibrated, the justifications well-rehearsed, the narrative intact. And somewhere within that system, ten gelada baboons have become a footnote – an instance of surplus successfully resolved.

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 Carlo Salzani is a research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria, where he leads the project “Animal Suffering and the Politics of Shame,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is also a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. His latest book, Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination, was published in open access by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.