Posted on 05/28/2016 4:42:31 PM PDT by xzins
CINCINNATI – A gorilla was killed after it dragged a 3-year-old boy that fell into its enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden Saturday, Zoo Director Thane Maynard said.
The boy was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening, police said.
Police and EMTs were called to the zoo at about 4 p.m. for reports that a gorilla was "slamming the child into the wall."
Maynard said the boy crawled through a barrier and landed in the moat. He was walking and splashing. Harambe, a 17-year-old male gorilla weighing more than 400 pounds, picked up the boy, Maynard said. Witnesses said the gorilla grabbed and dragged the screaming boy around the habitat for about 10 minutes.
RELATED: Silverback gorilla Harambe comes to Cincinnati Zoo for 'spring training'
Personnel from the zoo's dangerous animal response team decided to put down Harambe rather than tranquilize him because the boy was in danger and the tranquilizer would not have taken effect immediately, Maynard said. Two other gorillas in the exhibit were called back inside.
Maynard called it "a life-threatening situation" for the boy. The response team shot Harambe.
The anarcholibertarianfreewheelinifitain’tintheconstitutiondon’t”f”withme crowd would hate to hear about “tightly regulated” anything.
Nanny-state much?
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We’re not supposed to shoot eagles either. Is that a nanny-state problem for you too?
The parents need to reinforce the incident with the kid by making him binge watch the entire planet of the apes movie series.
There are bad zoos, but I favor the “more the better” angle since it reduces the chances of extinction or inbreeding and spreads the cost of supporting a breeding population out so that economic woes have less impact on the total number of specimens than if there were just a few well finced institutions. We’ve been lucky in recent history not to have truly great catastrophies strike but the fact is, they do happen, they are just as likely to strike in wealthy areas as poor, and when they do the species local to that area can go extinct overnight, even those contained in some leading zoo’s immaculate enclosures with all the amenities.
It’s better to have numerous individuals in their prime kept in both small and large groups in the event full scale breeding ever needs to be undertaken to replace or bulk up a species in the wild... and to have these dispersed all over the globe, rather than concentrated into just few large institutions that can be wiped out in a flood, eruption, war, or earthquake.
We could wake up one morning and the national zoo could be a smoking hole... while hundreds of “Johnny’s Roadside Animal Parks” out there, some better managed than others, are still full of healthy critters along with the usual collection of aged and crippled individuals. And with those, and the kids who enjoyed them and then went on into conservation careers, there’d be a reserve for that day things settle down.
Okay, maybe 20-30 in the USA. I don’t particularly care for taking healthy animals out of their natural habit and putting them in small zoos.
The decision to shoot the gorilla was a good decision. Human life is more important than animal life. The zoo administration should have a physical barrier built against small children getting into the gorilla area.
Lack of parental supervision of a young child...yet it seems nobody is asking about that.
Where are the PETA/Animal Rights wacko’s? Why are they not gathering and changing #GorillaLIvesMatter????
No, but saying that we should only have a half dozen zoos in the entire nation is...
There is that.
“Get your hands off me you dirty ape!”
For Mother’s Day, I spent hours climbing up a tree and rigging a system of ropes and pulleys attached to a new suspended bird feeder because a freaking bear *bent to the ground* the iron pole her bird feeder was perched upon.
When she called the DNR about the wretched destructive beast, rather than offering help in getting rid of it, they told her to not feed birds, anymore.
These are “her birds” and they’ve been giving her joy for decades.
But she should stop their gravy train, lest the Sacred Bruin be somehow damaged.
What crap.
She could do nothing but helplessly watch from the kitchen window as it wrecked her feeder.
Two weeks later, a neighbor spotted a sow with 2 cubs a mere mile from my house, casually crossing the road at the top of the mountain, which is a little over a quarter mile from mom’s house.
This qualifies as an infestation and sets a seriously bad precedent.
I am not like my mom.
A bear better not come here.
Zoo officials have said he must have gotten in under the rail, through wires and over the moat wall which would presumably be enough to ward off other animals. We will have to wait for security footage but it certainly looks like something other visitors or employees should have witnessed.
My memory says a 3 year old could not get in there without assistance.
I’ve been wondering how on earth it is possible for a child to get in there unaided.... surely that would be a dismally, horrendously bad design flaw.
There is the habitat and between it and the spectator side there is a huge moat. There is a very large, sheer drop on the spectator side. One report said it was 17 feet. I’m trying to imagine how the child fell that distance, landed in or near water, and survived the fall. Also, the drop from the gorilla side is pretty steep, too. I have never seen a gorilla attempt to go down that drop on its own side. Maybe they do, but never when I’ve been there. In any case, the male gorilla navigated that drop, retrieved the child, and either had it down near the moat or it climbed back up with it. (I could even envision it being a ‘rescue’ as crazy as that sounds...???) In my mind, I still can’t remember gaps in the barrier that would permit a 3 year old to slip through and then walk to and tumble down the sheer drop. Insurance seeker? Evil customer who put the child over the barrier when the parents weren’t watching? I hope they have video cameras.
And it’s entirely possible my memory of the exhibit is wrong.
They were able to call out two females from the enclosure but once a Silverback got into the moat I’m not sure there was another viable option. We will have to wait until a video is released to get a complete story.
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