On Gorillas, and Abandoning Children

On Gorillas, and Abandoning Children
A visitor touches a picture of Harambe, a male silverback gorilla, at a makeshift memorial outside the Gorilla World exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, Tuesday, June 7, 2016, in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Zoo reopened its gorilla exhibit Tuesday with a higher, reinforced barrier installed after a young boy got into the exhibit and was dragged by the 400-pound Harambe, which was then shot and killed. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

A visitor touches a picture of Harambe, a male silverback gorilla, at a makeshift memorial outside the Gorilla World exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, Tuesday, June 7, 2016, in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Zoo reopened its gorilla exhibit Tuesday with a higher, reinforced barrier installed after a young boy got into the exhibit and was dragged by the 400-pound Harambe, which was then shot and killed. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

For those of you who have had their heads stuck under rocks for the last week or so, a child recently fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cleveland zoo, resulting in the killing of the silverback Harambe.

The internet has been rife with parenting tips and folks mourning the dead gorilla since. People are blaming the mother, blaming the zookeepers for shooting the gorilla, and preaching the gorilla gospel. You know, talking about how loving and nurturing gorillas are, and that this has happened before and the gorilla just parented the child that had fallen.

Folks are missing the obvious though. Those other stories were about female gorillas, who are, generally speaking, nurturing and gentle creatures. Silverbacks, on the other hand, are fairly murderous bastards. They kill baby gorillas to assert dominance, and will literally crush you if you make eye contact with them. Silverbacks are territorial and violent, and that four-year-old child that fell in was about to become the log or tire in Harambe’s show of dominance.

What really baffles me, though, is how determined people are to blame the parents. Maybe it’s because I remember being a crappy kid, or because I’ve taught preschool, but kids tend to abide by the “Turn around for five seconds and I am GONE” rule fairly strictly. All of the witness reports from the zoo have said that this woman had two other children with her and was being an attentive mother. I’m confused as to why no one is placing blame on the zoo, who apparently have a gorilla habitat that can be accessed by a child in seconds.

The truly, truly mind-breaking thing about all of this comes from another story this last week involving a child in danger. Seven-year-old Yamata Tanooka was outright abandoned by his parents in the woods in order to teach him a lesson. After six days, he was found alive and mostly unharmed. Strangely, the majority of the internet that I’ve seen has either praised the parents “tough love,” expressed relief that the boy is okay, or some mixture of the two.

It’s odd that an accident has provoked such ire, and that parents intentionally setting out to punish a child in that extreme was met with such indifference. I get that a gorilla died, and whenever an exotic animal dies, the internet remembers we’re supposed to care about this stuff, and get mad. See also: Cecil the lion, the giraffe that fed a couple of villages, that cheerleader who big game hunts, the owner of Jimmy John’s, Ricky Gervais’ personal crusade against hunting. It’s all good and fine to care about animals, but the choice to send death threats in lieu of taking any meaningful action will never make sense to me.

All of this isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of folks reacting to these events in a perfectly logical way. Many people, myself included, know how terrible Harambe’s death is, but we also know that a dead four-year-old would have resulted in an equally dead gorilla. Also, the fact that numerous naturalists and professionals have come out and said “Here is reality” helps. There are also plenty of people, both online and in Japan, calling for the Tanooka family to be punished for their abandonment of young Yamata. As usual, though, the crazy vastly outnumbers the logical.

The outrage culture of the internet, which I have been an active part of in the past, has got to break. There’s too much to get mad about at any given time, and frankly, no one actually has the kind of energy to waste on that.

Categories: Commentary