The online world is outraged that a zoo in the United States killed a rare gorilla to save a 4-year-old boy who reportedly “slipped” into its enclosure.
According to CNN, "Cincinnati Zoo Director Thane Maynard said he stands by the decision to kill 17-year-old silverback Harambe to save the child.” Officials say that tranquilizing the animal wouldn’t have been the right call as it would take a few minutes to take effect and the child was in immediate and grave danger.
We’re not going to argue if that was the best course of action. I’m sure it was a tough decision to make. After all, it was a unique situation and was supposedly the first incident of its kind in the exhibit’s 38-year history.
Within days of the incident, a Change.org petition calling for “Justice for Harambe” has accumulated close to 400,000 signatures. The petitioners are asking for the zoo and related agencies to “hold the parents [of the child] responsible” for the death of the gorilla.
For its part, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent out a series of tweets, saying, “Yet again, captivity has taken an animal’s life. The enclosure should have been surrounded a secondary barrier to prevent this. Gorillas have shown that they can be protective of smaller living beings & react the same way any human would do to a child in danger. Even under the ‘best’ circumstances, captivity is never acceptable for gorillas or other primates & in cases like this it’s even deadly. This tragedy is exactly why PETA urges families to stay away from any facility that displays animals as sideshows for humans to gawk at.”
The concept of a zoo as we know it today has been in existence since 1828 with the launch of the London Zoological Gardens, primarily used for scientific study. It opened to the public in 1847 and since then, zoos began popping up all over the world for public consumption. Of course, zoos quickly became a place for entertainment.
During those times and perhaps, until recently, zoos have made sense as an educational venue for children and adults alike. In them, you see how animals behave and react to their environments and to humans. Going to a zoo as a child is an enlightening experience that gives one an appreciation of the animal kingdom that one wouldn’t have by only reading books and learning in school.
However, today, it seems that the zoo is an outdated concept. First of all, countless studies have proven that animals really do not do so well in captivity, especially in small cages or artificial environments found in city zoos.
In fact, plenty of city zoos have been called out for their poor maintenance and poor health of animal residents. Regardless of the quality of care zoo professionals give to the animals, experts still claim that the transition from being in the wild to captivity causes animals mental and emotional stress.
Second, we already have the Internet and TV shows dedicated to the exploration of wildlife, which are better because we actually get to see the animals in their natural habitat, albeit not physically. As educational materials, the documentation of animals in the wild allows us to see how they interact with, live, breed and survive in nature.
And third, there is an alternative to the modern zoo and it’s called a safari park. A safari park is a zoo-like establishment that allows visitors to observe animals freely roaming around. Here at home, we have two of those: the Calauit Safari Park in Palawan and the Zoobic Safari in Olongapo. Even though safari parks still are not the best homes for wild animals, they’re not as stifling, stressful and unnatural as the typical zoo.
The bottom line is that wild animals are not meant to be in the middle of the city and certainly not meant to be in cages as exhibits for people to look at and derive entertainment from. We all know that, but why does it seem that we’re still clueless? How many Harambes have to die for us to finally get the point?
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