…the typo that propelled Fred Chicken of Lexington into a lawsuit
365 DAYS, 365 POSTS #2
Humans VS Gorilla
It has been a long time since I wrote about anything serious (outside of deaths in the family) on this blog, but I’ve decided that I need to share my two cents about what happened at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Let me preface by saying that for the vast bulk of my life, I have put the welfare of the other species on this planet ahead of the welfare of homo sapiens. With few exceptions, if I had to choose between saving a dog or an adult human from a house on fire, I’d save the dog first, then try to help the human. I am a firm believer that there are way too many humans on this planet and they are seriously fucking it up for other species.
Now, having said that, if the burning house contained a child and a dog, I would rescue them both or die trying. Kids are not adults and people who hurt or abuse them are the lowest form of scum to me. I love kids, probably because they are more like animals than most of us adults are.
When I heard that a male had to be killed to keep a child safe from harm, I was pissed off. Pissed off at the zookeepers who did the killing, pissed off at the zoo for not having safer enclosures and pissed off at the child’s mother for not watching her kid well enough. If they had all dropped dead at that moment, I would have cheered.
After a couple of hours thought, I calmed down a bit and read more about what happened. It was a shitty deal for all concerned and what was done had to be done. The gorilla was going to hurt that kid bad and getting hit with a tranq dart would only have pissed him off before he passed out, possibly causing him to hurt the kid even worse. Had it been a female gorilla, odds are she would have realized there was an injured baby and taken him to a safe spot, but male gorillas think differently.
I feel for the zookeepers who had to make the choice they did, but they had to save that kid from any more harm. For those of you who might say “well, why not just go in and take the child away from the gorilla?”, I say “because a full grown male gorilla can jerk your arm out of the shoulder socket and beat you to death with it”. No, shooting him was all they could do.
I feel for the mother who was there with 4 kids and lost track of one for just a minute. Believe me, those of you who have never had to watch kids, they can go from being sound asleep to being in deadly peril in about 4 seconds.
I feel for the people of Cincinnati who have lost a dear animal friend. This sort of thing happens too often in zoos and animal parks. We do not need to animal proof such places for the humans. We need to people proof those places for the animal’s safety.
So, like I said above, it was a shitty deal all around, but I hope everyone concerned learned something important.
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