Visiting the zoo

The Cincinnati zoo incident offers basic lessons — on safety and common sense.

Few would argue that one of the most popular, family-friendly attractions in the greater Houston area is the Houston Zoo, situated on 55 acres within Hermann Park. A record-breaking 2.46 million people visited in 2015 to observe more than 6,000 animals, up from 2.38 million in 2014. And zoo officials anticipate attendance for 2016 to be even higher. But a recent event at the Cincinnati, Ohio, zoo is enough to spook any zoo fan; it shouldn’t, though it offers reminders that safety in such a setting with thousands of people in close proximity with wild animals should not be taken for granted.

Houston Zoo guests tell officials that their favorite areas are the gorilla exhibit and the Asian elephants habitat. That’s no surprise. There’s something special about those wild, majestic creatures, stunning in their intelligence, that trigger the curiosity and interest of us humans. However, the curiosity of a precocious 3-year-old boy visiting the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden with his family over the Memorial Day weekend put him in harm’s way when he breached a fence and fell into the gorilla exhibit moat. Many have seen video of the boy being grabbed and dragged like a toy by the 400-pound gorilla named Harambe. Zoo officials feared for the boy’s safety and killed the primate, instantly igniting debate about who was at fault.

While the debate continues, the dramatic incident, seared into our collective consciousness, offers basic lessons to be recalled and reinforced.

First, the Houston Zoo assuredly remains a fun, safe place. Few escapes happen, and rare is the occasion when a human enters an animal’s space, according to Houston Zoo spokeswoman Jackie Wallace. There is extensive security at all zoo habitats.

However, even with the best security and safety measure in place, Wallace points out, sometimes there are people who are determined to breach a fence or barrier. “We have had guests breach the initial barrier, but we have activated all of our protocols and resolved each incident successfully,” she said. And because of the incident in Cincinnati, the Houston Zoo reinforced its own safety protocols.

As the video of the Cincinnati incident has spread across social media, blame has been sought for the unfortunate loss of a critically endangered western lowland gorilla. It would be irresponsible to chalk up the incident with an “accidents happen” explanation; the stance would suggest there is no need for reflection about what went wrong.

We hope officials in Cincinnati take time to deconstruct the incident and develop procedures to reduce the chances of a similar incident from ever happening again, a process that should be closely monitored by other U.S. zoos as leaders there, too, review safety protocols.

We also trust that parents and guardians of young children keep in mind that children have an insatiable curiosity to look, see and touch everything in sight, whether it’s in the backyard at home or the zoo at Hermann Park, and need to be watched vigilantly.

The observations yield reflections that seem obvious. But the death of Harambe and the peril faced by that 3-year-old boy in Cincinnati remind us that even obvious safety measures — in a zoo, and, really, anywhere — also benefit from common sense.