Justice for Harambe? It’s a gorilla — get over it.
This was just an accident, not a great injustice
It’ s getting so there’ s nothing to parody anymore. Is it not galling enough that the death of any human being with any sort of profile is marked by a ghastly memorial of flowers and stuffed animals (that these maudlin displays have been around so long now they’re the furthest thing from “makeshift” doesn’t preclude that still being the favoured descriptor), a demand for a change in some law or another and a vigil or two?
Now, as an American blogger named Matt Walsh tweeted Monday, “A vigil for a freaking gorilla. God help this country.”
(I felt Walsh’s pain. In fact, for a minute I thought of proposing Matt’s Law, which would prohibit such mawkish public behaviour, and lock up offenders in tight quarters with one another, where they could fight for the rapidly depleting oxygen and put flowers meant for memorials in each other’s hair.)
Then, of course, Walsh proceeded to lose his mind and was soon tweeting, “While You Were Crying Over a Dead Ape, 125,000 Babies Were Just Murdered,” that a reference, if not exactly a segue, to abortion, there being no bad time to talk about “the mountain of dead human bodies piled in medical waste Dumpsters outside abortion clinics …”
The poor gorilla, of course, is Harambe, a justturned-17 western lowland gorilla who was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo on Saturday after a little boy went under a rail, through some wiring and over a moat wall, and found himself the focus of Harambe’s attention.
The zoo’s dangerous animal response team, fearing that tranquillizers would take too much time to kick in or might agitate Harambe, put him down.
Faster than you can say Jack the Bear (with all due respect to bears), a whole whack of people immediately lost their minds. Naturally, most of them went to social media to do it, which is only right.
By 1 p.m. Monday ,141,481 people had signed the Justice for Harambe petition, the justice in question being basically that the boy’s parents should be killed or, the actual petition proposal, that they at least be investigated by police for negligence for allowing the kid to escape their clutches.
Presumably, these folks have never had a slippery four-year-old in their charge. I’ve had only loaners, mind you, but my limited experience is that they disappear and get into jams with terrifying speed.
Others demanded to know why the zoo didn’t have faster acting tranquillizers, or insisted Harambe had merely been protecting the child. ( I have to say, in the video of Harambe whirli ng the kid through the water at breakneck speed, he didn’t strike me as terribly tender. But that’s a bit judgey. We mustn’t judge gorillas; only other humans.)
The only thing I didn’t see online were the questions asking why the response team hadn’t “shot to wound” or, you know, shot the boy out of Harambe’s clutches. Perhaps all those sharpshooters who unfailingly raise such matters with police who shoot humans are waiting in the weeds.
Zoo management was duly castigated for having such an allegedly inadequate barrier to the gorilla enclosure, though apparently it never before had been breached, not once in 38 years. Bastards: How could they not have known?
Animal l overs demonstrated their usual sensitivity to their fellow humans, with a few protesters showing up with signs, one of which was held aloft by a child and read, “Protect the Animals, Keep Brats out of the Habitats!” The makeshift memorial duly sprang up at the zoo’s gorilla statue.
Now, in a perfect world, gorillas and other animals would only roam free in their natural places, and there would be no poachers and trophy hunters there, and it’s magnificent to see them that way, as a visitor in their house.
But not everyone can afford a safari to Africa. Neither can everyone live fully and completely online. And in that gap between seeing animals in the wild or not seeing them at all there is probably still a place for the humanely run zoo; I feign no expertise here, but Cincinnati’s is the second- oldest in the United States and appears to be rated as one of the best.
Harambe was born in captivity, as it happens, in a zoo in Texas and moved to the Cincinnati zoo only in 2014.
He was a zoo baby, in other words, a creature of a breeding program — gorillas are an endangered species — made by man.
What happened to him this weekend was what used to be called, when it seems that people had a little perspective — more brains and less of a voice — an accident. This is not to say that the death of such a magnificent creature isn’t a great shame. It is. But Justice for Harambe? Enough already.
(CHILDREN) DISAPPEAR AND GET INTO JAMS WITH TERRIFYING SPEED.