Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most prominent primatologists, has weighed on the killing of a gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into the animal’s enclosure.
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Another witness, Catie Goodrich, says in a call: “There’s a baby in the zoo that fell in the gorilla moat”.
A spokeswoman said the family requests privacy and has no comment on the investigation.
“He’s dragging my son”.
A Cincinnati police report identifies the boy’s mother as 32-year-old Michelle Gregg, who works at a preschool near Cincinnati.
The zoo’s Gorilla world, with the revamped barrier, is set to open on Tuesday.
Another 911 caller, an unidentified woman, can be heard urging others at the scene to “try and calm down” and “be quiet”, to avoid agitating the gorilla.
“Our exhibit goes above and beyond standard safety requirements, but in light of what happened, we have modified the outer public barrier to make entry even more hard”, Maynard said.
“For me, I still think they could have gone another route though they said they couldn’t”. A video of the incident appears to show Harambe dragging the child around the enclosure.
The only barrier seen is a 3-feet-tall iron fence, easily scalable by a small child.
The zoo says it will look at whether it needs to reinforce the barriers even though it considers the enclosure more secure than what’s required.
The family said the toddler was “doing well” after the scare.
“It just was the right moment, the right time, the right scenario for them to shoot and kill him when they did in order to save the child’s life”, said Susan Altrui, assistant director of the Little Rock Zoo.
WEIGHING in on the Harambe story which is generating avid interest on social and mainstream media, officials of the Emperor Valley Zoo yesterday declared that faced with a similar situation, the choice would be the same as that made by the Cincinnati Zoo. Some have offered money to the family, which we do not want and will not accept.
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Ken Ham, the creationist behind Kentucky’s “life sized” replica of Noah’s ark, took to his blog this week to jump on the controversy surrounding Cincinnati zookeepers decision to shoot a silverback gorilla after a four year old boy fell into its cage.
