"Piers Morgan Live, Rewind": Surviving an avalanche, and living to tell about it; Jack Hanna on the euthanizing of a Danish giraffe

Whether you fell asleep early, stayed out too late, or simply want to watch it again, we realize it's not always possible to get your entire "Piers Morgan Live" fix from television. As an answer to this, we offer the below labor of love – "Piers Morgan Live, Rewind" – dedicated and designed to getting you caught up and connected to the conversation.

• Man survives avalanche to tell the tale

Snowmobiling tops the list of casualties from avalanche accidents, but Cory Strong not only survived – he filmed the whole thing.

“Not every day is like that obviously, but it's just the whole another world you're just by yourself, I mean, just you and the machine and you're trying everything not to get stuck and just keep your thrill way up,” said Strong, who lives in Beresford, Colorado.

Strong had strapped a GoPro video camera to his helmet before he and a friend hit the slopes. Minutes into his ride, Strong was slammed by what he thought was another snowmobile.

“I didn't even know it was an avalanche until I came to a stop and look behind me and seeing that there are all the snow that had gone, and then my snowmobile was upside down and covered up,” said Strong, who told Morgan he wasn't scared, but did panic when he couldn't find his friend and fellow snowmobile driver.

“In the video, you can see me like waving my arms up and down to my friends down below because I was in a little bit of panic to go find my friend that I thought was buried at the time,” Strong said, “And you can see it when I stand up on the snowmobile I actually - I'm sitting there waving my hands and then I point and then that's when I see him and then I knew that like we just got extremely lucky.”

• Jack Hanna on why he’ll never work with the Copenhagen Zoo

‘Jungle Jack’ doesn't stand for what happened to Marius. He told Piers Morgan that there is no excuse for shooting the two-year-old male giraffe at the Copenhagen Zoo, who was euthanized and publicly fed to lions at the zoo earlier this week.

Jack Hanna, a well-known face for modern American zoo keeping standards and animal conservation, is the Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, a non-profit zoo in Ohio.

“We control our breeding. We control what we do with our animals. We have breeding loads with each other,” Hanna told Morgan, “We know that the value of this animal is the most important thing we do when we have - we have the respect to this animal and to make sure it's entire life has lived out the best it can in a situation that this habitats cost tens and millions of dollars today, unlike in the old days.”

Now a second giraffe – also named Marius – at a different Danish zoo may be put down for similar reasons, leaving animal rights representatives around the world wondering why.

“In the wild - so the best conservation is our good hunters by the way,” said Hanna, who was asked by Morgan about whether shooting an animal could be the best case scenario, “However, the same with the rhino, which I have heard about, that's now a bad timing not when the rhino is on the verge of extinction of many, many - the poaching of the rhino as you all know is beyond out of sight right now. It's beyond uncontrollable.”

Hanna said a rhino’s horn currently cashes in at $200,000.000 – 500 times what one was worth when he first started his work in Africa. But comparing the shooting of a Danish giraffe and an African rhino may be apples and oranges. Hunting for donation profits, Hanna told Morgan, is a different issue entirely.

“A lot of the African countries are as corrupt as anything it can be. That money that these - some of these hunters are paying doesn't go one dime to the conservation of any animal over there,” Hanna said, “And so the hunters, they're in the right countries where animals had to be culled then that's up to the hunter in the country if it's a legal thing.”

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