The zoo’s president and CEO, Barbara Baker, made the comments Wednesday, days after a 3-year-old boy entered a gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo and authorities fatally shot the animal to save the boy’s life.
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A boy brings flowers to put beside a statue of a gorilla outside the shuttered Gorilla World exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, Monday, May 30, 2016, in Cincinnati.
People called for the child to be removed from the home where he was clearly being neglected.
As a parent, my heart almost stopped as I scrolled through trending topics on Facebook and caught the headline.
“I would have immediately and without hesitation jumped into that enclosure to protect my child, no matter the risks, and it would not have been the gorilla that would worry me, but rather the effect of the 15-foot drop”, Watson wrote in the viral post.
However, not everyone agreed with their decision. Thane Maynard, director of The Cincinnati Zoo, went as far as to acknowledge that if the situation arose again, he would make the same decision.
“You have human life and you have animal life”, Jack Hanna, the well-known zookeeeper and director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo, told CNN. I appreciate compassion for animals.
“I feel like zoos, the Denver Zoo, any zoo, are like animal prisons”, Jesperson said. “They couldn’t make a life or death decision if they had to”.
Western lowland gorillas are critically endangered and the killing triggered intense public debate over the zoo’s handling of the incident, the barrier to the gorilla enclosure, and the role of the boy’s parents. Others have said the zoo should press charges.
Cincinnati Zoo officials said the boy, who hasn’t been named, climbed a 3-foot fence and got through four feet of bushes before he fell 15 feet into the water-filled moat. Yes, young children are slithery. It’s a amusing world we live in. “And he’d drag him more”, she explained. “But he stayed with him”, she added.
This sure is the best take on the entire incident. “That would have definitely created alarm in the male gorilla”.
“We don’t have a lot of enclosures that lend themselves to that situation”, Sails said.
Let me leave you with this quotation by Joyce Meyer: “Instead of judging people, we need to pray”. Plus, children are driven. Each incident happened when they were about 4. On Saturday, one witness, heard the boy tell his mom, “I want to swim with the gorilla”. In a flash, he was in the exhibit. And if he had, I would have jumped in there and wrestled him free from that preening primate. But even if we could, how would that justify putting the little boy in harm’s way? Even for a child. How many zoo accidents are there per year? The barriers around the exhibits are safe.
Guess what, this child did not belong to me. But life is full of unknowns, and we can’t control all the infinite variables which shape our lives. The older kids who were following us laughed and laughed. None of the critics was at the zoo with Harambe, the boy, his mother nor the zoo keepers. The fact is you can’t watch your child every single second of the day. As parents we do the best we can with our children. Fortunately, most of the time it’s not a big deal and nothing bad happens.
Here whatever choice we make seems to suggest something awful will have happened, and this emotional response indicates not our failure to be ethical and moral but instead reveals our pain in choosing and our true virtue.
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“As a society we are quick to judge how a parent could take their eyes off of their child and if anyone knows me I keep a tight watch on my kids”.
