Image Credit: NY Daily News
This weekend, there was a tragic accident at the Cincinnati Zoo. A small child climbed over the barriers to the gorilla enclosure. He fell about 10 feet into the moat surrounding the animals before attracting the attention of Harambe — a 400 pound,17-year-old male gorilla.
The gorilla handled the boy — dragging and moving him, according to onlookers — while the other gorillas in the enclosure were called away by zoo staff. When it became clear that Harambe was not going to move away from the boy, zoo staff made the difficult decision to shoot him. He was killed as a result. The boy was transported to the hospital with serious but not life-threatening injuries.
Every single second of the ordeal sounds terrifying for everyone involved. It’s the stuff of nightmares for parents and zoo staff alike. I can’t imagine the horror and shock everyone is feeling in the aftermath. It’s truly a tragedy.
And now, along comes the Internet to make everything WORSE.
You don’t have to scroll very far down on Facebook or Twitter to see the holier-than-thou Protectors of All Things Endangered keening blame across the web. Just a quick peek at the #JusticeforHarambe tag on Twitter shows people calling for everything from forcing the parents to lose custody of their children to shuttering all zoos for the sake of the animals. People are dissecting every rumored move the parents of the boy did or didn’t make, attempting to make judgments about their past and their character, and — horrifically — voicing the wish that one of the parents had been shot instead of the gorilla.
Let’s just knock that right off, shall we?
Listen: Shit happens. Really bad shit happens. Sometimes, there’s no one to blame. A kid slipped away from his family, got away from nearby adults according to witness accounts, and ended up in the hands of a wild animal. And not a cute and cuddly wild animal, if opinions from an animal experts are to be believed. Even Jack Hanna, animal expert and director emeritus of the Cincinnati Zoo, says the staff made the right call. The whole thing was shit and it was all happening at once and there were no other choices.
Look, I get the outrage and the instinct to blame. We all want to distance ourselves from the possibility that we’ll be at the center of this kind of hurricane. It makes us feel better to say “My kid would never…” But you know what? Any kid might. They run into the street, they climb too high in trees, they put things they find on the ground in their mouths. And it all happens in a second — while a parent’s head is turned. Shit happens, and for 99% of us, it ends ok.
For this family, it didn’t. In this zoo, it didn’t.
There are a lot of scared, sad people involved in this story. I, for one, will stop talking about them now so they have space to process and recover and grieve. I hope we can all make room for that.
