Harambe the Gorilla
I needed some time to mull all this over. Wild Animals don’t belong in zoos. Maybe full scale wildlife natural protected ranges are ok. The kind where people have to get into jeeps and other assorted vehicles in order to see the animals. On the other hand, many endangered species, of which there are hundreds now, need protection, and may be forced unto these protected wildlife reserves.
Any member of a protected species, like Harambe, when taken into protective custody, or born into protective custody, should come with an ethical protective guarantee. That is, he is not going to be shot to death unless he escapes and puts people at risk.
So what about the public who want to view Harambe in a zoo? I think everyone who enters a zoo should have to sign a document agreeing that it is their responsibility to stay out of any exhibits or prevent any children in their custody, from getting to any exhibits. Failure to comply is at their own risk. After all, humans have overpopulated the planet, and are not an endangered species. The document should make clear that anyone who gains entrance into an exhibit via their own actions, or failure to prevent a child from gaining access, is at grave risk. The most the animal caretakers will do, in such a situation, is use tranquilizers on the animal.
A parent who dismisses their failure with “well accidents happen” should never bring a child to the zoo. That way an accident can’t happen. And sure, accidents actually can happen. A young child might suddenly dart out into heavy traffic and get fatally injured. We don’t kill the driver of the car. We don’t ban cars to ensure such a thing can never happen again. The driver of the car did nothing wrong. If we see a suspicious man talking to a young child in a park we can’t just shoot the man because obviously this creep might be up to no good. We intervene otherwise the best we can to ensure the safety of the situation.
If a parent is going to take the responsibility, or risk, to bring a 4 year old child to the zoo, and let that child loose around the edges of the exhibit, that is the risk the parent takes. If I take the risk to swim across a fast moving stream in a park and drown in the process, I can’t logically blame the park for the fast flowing water.
I can’t quantify what the actual risk is of taking a child to a zoo. But the risk is there, and if we take the risk, we can’t then say that, if necessary, an endangered animal must be shot to save a child. Risk taking means, at least to me, that we accept the risks, not act like it is the responsibility of others to eliminate any risk. Personal responsibility is just as it is defined. If someone has a jalopy of some sort that is risky to ride in, we shouldn’t ride in that vehicle.
I don’t agree that patrons who go to the zoo be able to assume endangered animals will be shot if any of the patrons get into an exhibit. Some of the more modern exhibits are open air exhibits so that animals can be seen in a more natural setting, not in a cage. If one accepts the risk of riding in an open truck bay or hike through an animal preserve, that hardly should mean animals must pay the cost for doing what wild animals sometimes do. We are either willing to take the risk, or we don’t go in the reserve and wander around. Most of us are willing to take the risk. We are the ones taking the risk, so how can we logically insist an animals life is in danger for our risk taking?
So you might say, “You mean if I am touring a wildlife reserve I can’t shoot a wild animal that attacks me?” I guess I am saying that. You shouldn’t be in there with a gun. Those animals are usually pretty tame, used to seeing humans and there is rarely a problem unless some dope irritates these animals. It is us that have entered a preserve in which the animals are protected from us. If we are in the wild, then neither the animals or us have any guaranteed protection from the other. If an animal attacks we are free to defend ourselves. In the wild, we are not in a preserve for us or the animals.
The child was in the preserve for 10 minutes before help arrived. Tranquilizing the gorilla would have added maybe two more minutes. With people all screaming at the top of their lungs the gorilla raced with the child to an area of the exhibit outside the view of the screaming crowd and cowered over the child in a protective fashion. According to Jane Goodall, the probability was that the gorilla thought it was protecting the child. But according to everything above, that is moot. The mother in question, took the risk of not hanging onto her child, even after the child stated, according to onlookers, that he wanted to go into the exhibit. I doubt the child took one quick leap and was into the exhibit. The child was only 4 years old. The mother is guilty of causing the death of a rare and endangered gorilla. She should pay the penalty for having done that.
Thousands and thousands of people have gone to that exhibit. Statistically it is clearly pretty safe. The statistics don’t lie. It was pretty safe. If we don’t want any risk at all, just close the exhibit to the public. Notions that humans are more precious than other species, more precious than our natural resources, more precious than the climate, are absurd. We are so self serving in our assessment of our importance as a species—so precious—that even the consequences of overpopulation does not apply to us. We simply claim dominion over all other aspects of the evolutionary process. Thus, whatever we want, we take, and even when what we want is genocidal to our own species, we stand on individual freedom. The starkest irony is that even though any reasonable person knows that the human population cannot be allowed to double again, as it has in my lifetime, we still insist there is no need for responsible reproduction on our part. We managed to end the life of Harambe, whose whole species is about to become extinct via human activities, and with even more collective ignorance, we are about to assure that millions of human will need to die, essentially through human genocide against each other, as the price for planetary human overpopulation. To me, this is just self-serving stupidity driven by outsized human egos about our own self importance. Of course you and I are very important. But sometimes I wonder about you.
