Only our ignorance could put such anthropomorphic 'values' on this death as it deserved to die because of breeding with it's daughters. Inbreeding among many animals is common. It's often also useless as any offspring may be sterile and, if successful, and favoured by natural selection , then inbreeding can flourish in some species as the best survival strategy. In our past evolutionary history - long before human laws were made - incest would have been rife among Homo-type populations.

In many animals though inbreeding occurs because the animals are being kept in a closer contact with each other than they would in truly wild conditions. Inbreeding is a result of confinement rather than the default setting fo that animal. In other words, if we are to invoke incest laws on this beast, then we have to likely blame the humans who keep the herd all close together and not in wholly natural conditions of that animals evolution.

If we are to keep animls in such confines then I guess we owe it to them to manage the herd well and kill off the ones who are weak, ill, injured or dying. In such circumstances I suppose we take the role of the prey animals that we killed off long ago that would usually prey on such beasts.

My heart feels wholly against what they did to this magnificent animal. He earned his place naturally and the whole idea of ruts and lekking is nature's invention. He was doing no wrong.

If human arrogance is to start judging animals by human laws then we really do need to start giving animals human rights! We owe it to them to give them some rights anyway, on account of our so called domain over them, but judging them and executing them on human traits seems more than a tad wrong

mp