Well, after all the noise, I’ve decided to weigh in on Harambe the Gorilla, and then I’ll not mention it or like/comment on any posts about it again.
It’s easy, at first, to be aghast that a zoo killed one of their animals because a child got into the enclosure. Like a lot of people I was perplexed, at first, and not sure how outraged I should or shouldn’t be. I mean you figure a zoo has one job, and that’s to care for the animals in the name of preservation and education. But the facts are out there, including commentary by experts who know far more than the rest of us ever will on the subject, and when you bother to read the details, the picture changes a bit. When Jungle Jack Hannah says he agrees “one-thousand percent” with the Cincinnati Zoo’s decision, I feel like that really ought to be the end of the discussion.
However, for the sake of education and clarity, let’s delve into some facts. Harambe was a magnificent creature, a 450lb silverback of the species gorilla gorilla gorilla, or, commonly, a western lowland gorilla. Silverbacks are alpha males, the leader of their troop, and they have the strength of approximately ten men.
You read that correctly: the strength of ten men. Being the target of a pissed-off gorilla is literally like getting your ass kicked by the Incredible Hulk. You don’t come back from that. And though gorillas are considered the least intelligent of the great apes, they are still smart enough to learn some sign language, play games, and use computers in limited capacities. They’re like three year old kids with superheroic strength. If that doesn’t sound dangerous to you, you need to think a little bit harder about what kids are really like.
I read a post by a former zookeeper the other day who said that in zoos, they classify the animals based on how dangerous they are, and gorillas are in the top tier right along with tigers and lions. If you aren’t sure how dangerous tigers are, I have two words for you: Roy Horn. If you aren’t sure who Roy Horn is, I have one more word for you: Google. It’s important, too, to remember the 2009 incident between poor Charla Nash and Travis the chimp.
Travis was a star of TV and commercials, and was, by 2009, a 200lb chimp living in a home with his owner, Sandra Herold, who having lost her husband and her only son, had treated Travis like her baby. Travis was very smart and was a popular figure around the town where he and Sandra Herold lived. But he was on Xanax for a medical condition he had, and that may have contributed to what he did to his and Sandra’s friend, Charla, tearing off her face, ears, and hands, and rendering her blind. Charla was one of the first Americans to receive a face transplant surgery. Chimps are nastier than gorillas, but it bears considering anyway, because if a little ol’ chimp can do that to a grown woman, you don’t really want to imagine what a big-ass gorilla could do to a toddler.
Zookeepers rarely have any actual contact with unsedated gorillas, instead remaining on the other side of barred partitions. They also have protocols in place for what to do if a visitor gets into an enclosure, and in these instances the life of the person takes priority over the life of the animal if they are forced to choose. By the time the decision was made to put Harambe down, zookeepers had already called the other gorillas out of the exhibit and into the holding area, but Harambe stayed in the exhibit with the kid.
What’s not clear is what Harambe’s intentions were. If he’d meant that kid any harm, the kid could well have been dead already…even Jane Goodall says she thinks Harambe may have been acting protectively. What IS clear is that the frantic reaction of the crowd to Harambe’s antics, was riling him up. And if you’ve watched the video, he was dragging that kid around like a little girl does with a doll. They had to make a decision, they had to do it quickly in order to ensure the safety of the child, and they chose not to gamble with the child’s life. Unfortunately that meant shooting a stunning specimen of a critically endangered species.
Now, with that said, the parent(s)… I do believe bear some responsibility. I hesitate to get into this too strongly because I am not a parent myself, and I feel as though critiquing someone’s parenting when I have no experience of my own in that arena, is as silly as critiquing an expert’s opinions on gorillas when I know nothing more than what I learned when I wrote a research paper on them twenty-three years ago. With that said, I’ll lay out my position.
Even without any parenting experience, I know two things for sure: First, that parenting is HARD, and second, that children don’t come with instruction manuals. Knowing this, I have to believe that every parent screws something up at some point, and screwing up therefore cannot be the decider in what makes a good parent or a bad one. Kids, after all, have no compunctions about doing what you tell them not to do. So I’m not calling the woman a bad mother when I say she screwed up, but when your four year old child climbs into the gorilla enclosure at the zoo and you don’t notice until he’s being ragdolled by a humongous silverback, a parenting fail can fairly be said to have occurred.
I won’t lay the whole thing at her feet. How many people were in the zoo that day? It’s the Cincinnati Zoo on Memorial Day weekend, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was a hell of a lot of people. So how do a crowd of adults, and presumably teenagers, and even other kids, not notice the munchkin climbing through the railing and snatch him back? I realize it’s unpopular to grab somebody else’s kid, but it’s worse to let them fall twelve feet into a pit with a 450lb gorilla. You gotta look out for people. I’ll let the mom go off on me and call the cops for grabbing her kid off the railing before I’ll let him fall in there. I mean which is the greater evil?
Witnesses also report having heard the kid say several times that he wanted to go in and play with the gorillas. His mother told him he couldn’t, but then he did it anyway. If you’re standing around overhearing this whole exchange, how do you not decide to be on the lookout for trouble? If we’re blaming anybody we can spread it around like manure and not be out of line, but I think it’s pointless at this juncture, because blaming, signing petitions, and internet shaming won’t put an extra ounce of sense in the child’s head or bring the dead gorilla back to life. Instead, you’ve got to make the most of the reality we’re in.
So what I see here is a lesson in responsibility for the kid. I hope his parents use this to remind him that his actions have consequences, and in this case it nearly it cost him his lfie, and DID cost the gorilla his life, and while the child should not have to go around feeling like crap his whole life because of one stupid choice, he should definitely be given to understand that his actions had consequences and that the next time his mother tells him he can’t do something, she might have a damn good reason for saying so.
The zoo, the parents, the other patrons, the kid, the rest of the gorillas at the zoo… everybody gets to take a bite of this crap sandwich, there’s no need to force-feed them any extra.
In the meantime, I’m entirely certain that the Cincinnati Zoo will be reviewing the design of their facilities and looking to make some changes to prevent more of this happening.
Further, I move that “shooting the gorilla” should now be a colloquialism (as with such fine examples as “jumping the shark,” “nuking the fridge,” or “closing the Washington Monument”), meaning to destroy something of value, preemptively, rather than taking a chance on good faith.
As an example: “I really like that girl but I think she might have been looking around, so I decided to just shoot the gorilla and end the relationship.”
