If you were anywhere near civilization over the Memorial Day weekend, you know about the kid who clambered into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and got dragged around like a ragdoll by a silverback named Harambe. There’s video, of course, because everybody has a smartphone:
It doesn’t look to me like the gorilla wanted to hurt the kid. But he could have hurt him. Those animals are incredibly strong and fast. So, before the situation could get any worse, the zoo shot Harambe. Not with a tranquilizer gun, but with the real thing.
Harambe is dead, and that little boy is alive.
Guess which part of the preceding sentence means anything to animal-rights freaks?
The director of the zoo where a 4-year-old boy fell into a moat that housed a silverback gorilla Saturday said he stands by the decision to kill the 400-pound animal.
“We stand by our decision, and we’d make the same call today,” Thane Maynard, director of the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, said at a press conference Monday. He added that people who second-guess the decision “engage in Monday-morning quarterbacking and do not understand primate biology.”
His remarks came as animal rights groups were expressing outrage over the killing of the 17-year-old gorilla.
That’s right: The Cincinnati Zoo has been forced to defend its decision to save a little boy’s life.
Should this kid’s mother have been paying better attention to what he was doing? Possibly.
Should gorillas be locked up in zoos in the first place? Maybe not.
Did they really need to kill that gorilla instead of sedating him? Ya got me, man.
But the kid did get inside that enclosure, and he could have been seriously injured or killed. How about taking a moment to be glad he wasn’t?
The one nice thing I can say about animals is that they don’t have Facebook. Christopher Brennan, NYDN:
Internet commenters have gone bananas over the death of Harambe the gorilla, and have begun throwing verbal feces at unsuspecting corners of the web. Social media vigilantes vented their outrage over the 4-year-old who fell into the enclosure of the Cincinnati by targeting a woman they thought was the boy’s mother but actually just shares the same name.
Observers were quick to blame Michelle Gregg for the death of Harambe, who was shot dead by his zoo on Saturday after grabbing on to her son…
Gregg shared screenshots of herself replying to multiple messages telling the senders to have a “blessed day” and informing them that the woman they wanted to torment had actually taken down her Facebook.
For more on the woman these idiots meant to howl at, here’s Lindsay Kimble at People Magazine:
Michelle Gregg defended herself in a now-deleted Facebook post, writing: “God protected my child until the authorities were able to get to him. My son is safe and was able to walk away with a concussion and a few scrapes… no broken bones or internal injuries.”
So these people were screaming at the wrong woman, for the wrong reasons. A little boy was tossed around like a toy by a 400-pound gorilla and survived, and their response is to harangue the kid’s mom.
And of course, now it’s a moronic meme:
#justiceforharambe This picture sums everything up .rip justice will be served pic.twitter.com/aXaqax9XJw
— xrx (@xoxoxrxoxo) May 30, 2016
I’m pretty sure this woman doesn’t drag her son around by his leg at 20 MPH, banging his head against the concrete. But sure, morons, you run with that.
It’s easy to say, “I’d never let my kid do that. I’d watch him like a hawk (which, incidentally, is another animal I value over human life).” Sure, sure, you’ve never taken your eye off your kid for 10 seconds in public. This could never, ever happen to you. Keep telling yourself that.
If you’re so damn empathetic, how about putting yourself in that woman’s shoes? Imagine it was your kid down there. Imagine watching that happen to him, and then being able to hold him in your arms again and tell him you love him. Would you really be crying over a gorilla?
I don’t have anything against Harambe, that noble creature of the forest. I also don’t care that he’s dead, because it means a human being is alive. Humans are better than animals. The End.
At least the people screaming about Cecil the Lion can legitimately point out that the man who defeated him, Walter Palmer, wasn’t in any immediate danger. That doesn’t apply here. This little boy was in danger, and now he’s not. It’s too bad that the gorilla had to die, but them’s the breaks.
Get over it, you species-traitors.