One year after the baboon killings: Nuremberg keeps breeding, seven of nine young dead

A year ago, Nuremberg Zoo had twelve healthy Guinea baboons killed because their enclosure was overcrowded.

The outcry was immense; activists chained themselves to the ape enclosure, forced their way onto the grounds and set up a protest camp. A year on, nothing has been resolved legally, nothing has improved in terms of animal welfare policy, and the zoo carries on breeding undeterred. Of the nine baboon babies born since, only two have survived. Seven are dead.

This is no mere footnote to the anniversary, but proof that the zoo has drawn no consequences from the killing. The species conservation organisation Pro Wildlife, which filed a criminal complaint at the time, has analysed the facility's population data and thereby exposes what lies behind the zoo's species conservation façade.

The proceedings are ongoing, a charge is still pending

Around 800 criminal complaints against those responsible at the zoo have now been received by the Nuremberg-Fürth public prosecutor. According to the authority, the investigations are continuing unchanged, a decision on whether to bring charges is still pending, and whether it will come to a trial at all remains open.

At its heart, this is a simple legal question with far-reaching significance. German animal welfare law prohibits the killing of an animal without reasonable grounds. Whether the overcrowding of a zoo enclosure constitutes such grounds becomes, beyond the individual case, a precedent for the whole of zoo practice. We covered the first wave of criminal complaints in the article «Criminal complaint against Nuremberg Zoo following killing of healthy baboons» documented, with the background in the appeal «Stop the plan to kill baboons in Nuremberg!».

35 years of aimless breeding: the stock register exposes the species-conservation myth

Pro Wildlife's central finding stems from the stock data of the past 35 years, which the zoo was required to release under the Bavarian Environmental Information Act. They paint the picture of a breeding operation that has nothing in common with serious species conservation.

Although the zoo officially participates in the European Endangered Species Programme (EEP), it has not taken in a single animal from another facility in 35 years and has not given one away in ten years. Such an isolated group carries a high risk of inbreeding, with consequences ranging from hereditary diseases to increased juvenile mortality. Serious conservation breeding works precisely the other way round: zoos regularly exchange their animals and pair the parent animals deliberately in order to preserve genetic diversity.

In Nuremberg, by contrast, reproduction was left to chance. Not a single one of the animals bred there has a recorded father, and in 76.5 per cent of cases information on both parents is missing. 187 animals born in Nuremberg over 35 years, not a single addition from outside. «This has nothing to do with serious conservation breeding,» says Laura Zodrow, zoo expert at Pro Wildlife. There is no reintroduction project for the Nuremberg baboons, nor is one planned, not least because there are no safe areas in the countries of origin and the zoo could not meet the scientific criteria for a reintroduction into the wild.

That the label «species conservation» often simply conceals stock management is a pattern we have documented several times, for instance with the «killing of surplus animals» and most recently at Zurich Zoo, which «killed ten healthy geladas».

Nine births, seven dead juveniles

The most recent breeding data show that the zoo is continuing unchanged. Since July 2025 alone, nine more Guinea baboons were born, in an enclosure that is already too small. Seven of them died, only two survived. What the juveniles died of is not recorded in the stock register.

«A zoo that justifies the killing of healthy animals with animal welfare, but at the same time allows ever more young animals to be born into an overcrowded enclosure, most of which do not survive, does not prevent animal suffering but produces it», says Zodrow. And the fundamental problem remains unsolved: the facility is designed for 25 animals plus offspring; at the time of the killing 43 baboons lived there, and currently there are again 31. The zoo is not expanding the enclosure and is not using contraception. The space problem will therefore arise once more, and with it the threat of the next killing. This is precisely what Pro Wildlife warns of: the next baboons could soon be shot.

The demand: stop breeding and killing

Pro Wildlife is calling for an immediate end to baboon breeding in Nuremberg. Instead of financing effective protection in the natural habitat, the zoo squanders resources on uncoordinated breeding without space and without any prospect of release into the wild, while producing enormous animal suffering. The organisation demands a legal obligation: zoos should only be allowed to breed if they can permanently guarantee the offspring species-appropriate housing. «The senseless breeding and killing must finally come to an end», says Zodrow.

The Nuremberg case is thus emblematic of a fundamental contradiction of the zoo system, which legitimises itself through species conservation but in everyday practice follows a logic of growth and exploitation. Whoever breeds healthy animals only to kill them later for lack of space is not engaged in species conservation. They produce the very suffering they claim to prevent.

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