Fair enough.
Kid is pretty dumb, but also just four years old. Bigger question is, what the f*ck is up with parents these days?
I’ve only seen a couple far-out whackjobs actually question the shooting. They either say the zoo should have tranq’d the gorrilla or offered him a treat. The obvious problems with both those scenarios:
Tranqing - It takes a couple minutes for the gorrilla to get knocked out. During that time he’s going to be extremely upset that someone shot him with a dart and probably would have hurt the kid in his pissed off rage (probably unintentionally, actually, but what difference does that make?). And, after the 450 pound gorrilla passes out, it would have very likely either A) landed on the kid, or worse, B) landed on the kid in the water.
Using treats - The gorrilla had a real life doll to play with. What exactly was going to be more inticing than that?
The backlash I’ve heard against the zoo has been for inadequate safety measures to keep people out of the exhibit. Meh, the kid had to go through a lot to get in there so I don’t buy into that either. Blame the mom.
My initial reaction was to blame the parents, too, but I’ve changed my mind on that, or at least reduced my criticism.
If you’ve been a parent or even a step-parent, you know that kids can wander away when you least expect it, and just a few seconds of distraction with something else (buying a hot dog, or looking for your spouse) can be enough. It’s not feasible to watch them 24/7, even if we know that we ought to. There are other aspects of life that need to be managed too. Especially if the family has more than one kid, one might be throwing a tantrum, and the other - sensing your distraction, or perhaps just curious about stuff - goes off and does something
And most of the time, if the kid wanders off, you just have to look around and find them…
So although I wonder why the family could let the kid do that, realistically, there are times when parents are overloaded, frazzled, tired, confused about things, where realistically this can happen. Something really bad happened this time around, but it’s bad luck on what the kid decided to do, not gross negligence on the part of the parents for getting distracted for a second. Gross negligence would be something like “Hey Junior, now that you’ve made it through the fence, see what else you can do in there.”
That said: I do wonder why (in the bit of film I saw) the mom seems strangely unfazed, crying out “Mommy’s here. Mommy loves you.” Somehow I would expect mommy to be a little more panicked. But it is true that different people react to stress differently. Some are more stoic than others.
it would have been black lives matter vs gorilla lives matter any way you slice it. can’t win these days
people want and need something to be mad about so they don’t have to deal with their own issues
I don’t know if this qualifies as “fault”, but the parents definitely dropped the ball here. I mean look, their kid jumped into a gorilla pit. If Lebron James misses an easy shot and loses a basketball game, it’s maybe not his fault, since no one is perfect. However, he still probably could have prevented that. Otherwise, we could say the kid himself is primarily at fault, but 4-year-olds are dumbasses - they don’t know what they are doing. The zoo has 99.99999% success rate of not having visitors fall into gorilla pits, so I would be more likely to assign responsibility over this incident to the visiting party.
My understanding is that the kid squeezed through the fence and then fell into the pit. From the parents point of view, it’s a black swan kind of event. Getting distracted for a minute at a zoo or park might typically result in 5 minutes of wandering around shouting “Junior, get back here!!” or at worst calling the zoo to help look for junior. There is no real reason to suspect imminent danger of gorilla fraternization. After all, how often do we hear about stories like this. It’s hardly a common event, even among 4 year olds who are curious.
Put it this way, let’s say you are driving and were distracted by a bee for 3 seconds. During that two seconds, you hit a pedestrian. Maybe it is not your fault (god damn bees). But in this accident, you are still at fault.
I gotta agree with Ohai here.
Bees! Bees! Bees in the car! Bees everywhere! God, they’re huge and they’re sting crazy! They’re ripping my flesh off! Run away, your firearms are useless against them!
YES. YES. Tommy Boy, classic
The parents should hopefully feel like crap after this. And yes, handcuffing the kid to the parent would likely have prevented this.
anyone use one of these?
Bump
harambe, when the walls fell
A restaurant near my office just put a Harambe Burger on the menu. Not sure what it has to do with Harambe, may he RIP.
Did you have your **** out while ordering and eating it?