Gorillas That Are Missed

Crap happens.  That was pretty much my initial reaction to the story about the unfortunate shooting of an adult male gorilla in the Cincinnati, Ohio zoo.

I'm not sure that anyone has not heard the story at this point, since it seems to be one of those things that everyone has an opinion about, whether or not they should.  A little boy of three or four managed to get into the gorilla exhibit at the zoo, whereupon one gorilla decided to play with the toddler as if he were a toy, dragging him around the pool in which the gorilla typically played.

Children are not toys, and the zoo personnel did what they could -- which was pretty much nothing; there was nothing realistic available given the threat -- to resolve the problem.  They followed their protocol and shot and killed the gorilla before he could hurt the child further.

No one wanted that to happen.  The zoo certainly did not want to lose this rare and beautiful animal which was part of their exhibit.  Who would want a gorilla to die?  But a gorilla is also a huge, powerful animal capable (this one was over 400 pounds) of inflicting fatal damage to a small child, or maybe an NFL player.

The last couple days, my God, it is as if everyone has to come down with an opinion, whether it is PETA or the press or the Twitterverse or, well, apparently, me.  Just yesterday morning I heard some animal-rights activist (does that actually pay a wage?) be asked how the gorilla could have been saved.  He rambled an answer about how gorillas shouldn't even be in zoos, the typical evasion of someone who knows he is wrong.

And boy, have we learned things we didn't need to know.  We have discovered that, for example, the child's father has a long rap sheet including a year's jail sentence for a variety of offenses, as if that somehow matters (hint: it doesn't).  We learned that zoos, specifically this one, have a pretty limited array of options when someone is so careless as to wander into a gorilla cage.

We also learned that some people, surely with nothing better to do, are trying to push through a law in the state that forces a level of responsibility on parents with punitive consequences, beyond what may already exist.  That would be in honor of the gorilla, but extrapolates to be the threat that nanny-state actions -- remember the Maryland "free-range parents" -- pose as unintended consequences.

But children do wander into gorilla cages.  They dart into traffic.  They fall.  They do the things that little children do and, in this case, it cost the life of an endangered animal.  We don't yet know the details of how the child got in the cage in the first place, but unless anyone can say for sure that the parents were not paying attention to him (as opposed to the child dashing off while in their watchable neighborhood), all we can go with is that he simply ran into the fenced gorilla space.

I helped raise a couple sons, and I can assure you, not that you didn't know already, that little boys will indeed suddenly run somewhere.  You can't handcuff them to you and (almost) nobody tries to do that.

It would seem that, unless we discover something that tells us there was a much higher level of situational neglect than anyone is saying there was, this is simply a terrible outcome of children doing what children do.  After all, the parents were taking their kids to the zoo.  I don't care what the father's rap sheet looks like, how much neglect do you impute to the parents if they're taking their kid out to the zoo?

Crap happens.  In this case, it happened with the loss of a priceless animal.  But Lord, do we have to keep forcing there to be fault and blame and punishment when something bad happens?  Earthquakes -- must be that bad fracking.  Tornado hits Kansas -- must be that evil global warming.  A gorilla has to be shot to save a child who wanders into a gorilla cage -- those parents should have had him on a leash.

You know what?  Bad things happen without malice.  And they ever will.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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