Everyone can remember Marius the giraffe, whose life came to a premature end last year at Copenhagen Zoo. Now the zoo has a new naming policy and is no longer giving its animals person names, DR reports.
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Bengt Holst, the scientific head of the zoo, explained the policy to DR. “Some animals live so long that they get a kind of personality at the zoo. So we’ve chosen to have a naming policy along the lines that that we will no longer give them person names,” he said.
“We don’t want to have a human relationship. So they’ll have a name that relates to their biology.”
This new policy came into effect when one of the newest additions to the menagerie, a three-month-old rhino, was named on Sunday. It was named Pilan. “It was an obvious choice,” Holst explained.
“Because the mother actually comes from Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa.”
