On Saturday evening a tragedy has happened. A 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla Harambe that has been living in the Cincinnati Zoo has been killed. A child somehow found his way past 3 barriers between him and the enclosure and then fell into the enclosure where the Harambe was living.
In the National Geographic's article about what happened to Harambe Terry maple has a few words to say about Harambe's behavior. “To tell you the truth, what I saw in that film looked normal to me—in other words, normal gorilla behavior,” Terry Maples says. “Sometimes, when male [gorillas] steal babies, they will grab them by the ankle or the hand and run around with them.”
Looking at the footage from the accident you will see Harambe pulling him ( through the water) around. The video looks like the Gorilla is being aggressive to the boy but we do not really know what the motives of the gorilla were.
Animal rights activists protested Monday, May 30th at the Cincinnati zoo about the killing of Harambe. They were upset because Harambe is a Western Lowland Gorilla which is an endangered species.
At first I did not understand why the zoo officials killed the Gorilla but the more videos I saw the more I began to understand. The Zoo Officials were more worried about the child's safety then what Harambe's motives were. The first priority was making sure that the child made it out alive.
This has caused outrages and many debates across the world about how the whole situation was handled. Many people have blamed the parents of this child whom I agree is mostly to blame for this because it could have been prevented. Even though I do not have any children I do understand that children could get up to anything in a matter of seconds. But this whole situation could have been prevented if the parents were paying attention. This situation happened in the matter of minutes, not seconds there was plenty of time to stop this child from entering the gorilla enclosure.
