I’d be in favor of that, providing that he or his family bears the costs of steriluzation.
Just his parents and him, no need to go any further. Freeze any money they have in the bank, if that proves insufficient, foreclose on their car, house, etc.
But there’s a difference between making an enclosure kid proof and adult proof. I think you could make an enclosure basically kid proof, where the kid would have to be extraordinarily determined and/or unlucky to be able to get in, but it would be a lot harder to make it so a determined stupid adult couldn’t get in.
Does the zoo, in fact, have an insurance that will reimburse it for rhe costs of acquiring a new gorilla?
He only says ‘Gorillas make good neighbors’.
Child is the mischief in me, and I wonder
It I could put a small hand through these bars:
Why do they make good neighbors? Is it for
Playing with kids?
For here there is a kid.
Although they built a wall i’d like to know
What they were walling in or walling out…
Genius!! RF is my favorite poet, and that is pure genius. Bravo!!!
That zoo needs more walls! And better walls! Vote Trump!
ACQUIRING?! You talk about it like it was some sort of slave, not an endangered great ape worth more than a stupid human child!
IMO, a zoo is for learning and enjoyment. So is an overlook beside the highway, so is a lot of places, even ones you have to pay to get into.
Expecting a place that you want to exhibit wild animals for you & your children to be able to see, enjoy & learn from to be 100% safe is unrealistic and wrong IMO.
What I would want to see in cases like this would not be popular so just let me say I am hoping to get info from a family member who is in the zoo business to give me some of that side of the issue’s opinions on the whole safety thing.
As a parent, I never did nor would I blame anyone but myself if my small ones got through any type of barrier and I know from all my life experiences and teachings events that there is no such thing as ‘child proof’ anything.
Not even multiple kids and one is critically in need does that automatically ever absolve me from protecting them all. It never shifts the responsibility to something that is supposedly kid proof. That thing does not exist.
I’ll be back if I can get anything from the relative. 
A venue that markets itself as a place for children’s edutainment has a responsibility to be safe for children behaving like children.
Barriers in zoos exist to protect both the animals and the guests as their number one function. They should be built such as to be extremely and equally difficult for either the enclosed animal or a disturbed adult human or unsupervised small child guest to overcome, for the safety of both. In this case the barrier was inadequate to even stop a four year old child with tragic result. Maybe this kid had some special mutant powers or there was rare confluence of other factors but barring that the presumption is flawed barrier design.
I dunno, why don’t you call them and see if they have a gorilla exclusionary clause.
does the city you live in have impenetrable barriers that stop children from running onto a highway? The Zoo had a plan in place to deal with the situation and it was dealt with.
And make the gorillas pay for them!
No great ape, no matter how endangered, is worth more than a human child, no matter how stupid.
Or we’d be back to zoos with animals in tiny, abusive cages. Or the human paths would be entirely enclosed by Plexiglas, walls and ceiling, and zoo visitors would complain that zoos are supposed to be about being outside.
I’ve looked at some of the video news coverage. The kid had to 1. climb over a railing, 2. climb through a wire fence, 3. push his way through several feet of very dense bushes and underbrush (I suck at eyeballing distance, but I’d say at least 6-8 feet), 4. and fall down a sheer 20ish-foot drop to get into the enclosure. That’s “not enough” due diligence by the zoo? They should anticipate parents who leave their kids completely unattended for the solid half a minute or more it would take a small child to force their way through all those obstacles?
I’m sorry, but if you have a rambunctious 4-year-old, you don’t turn your back on them for minutes at a time. Not in a store, not in a playground, and not in a zoo. There’s also something to be said for teaching a child that fences are not there to be circumvented in the first place; 4 years old is plenty old enough to understand that.
I still expect that the parents assumed that the zoo was basically a giant daycare.
So what would the authorities do if a toddler managed to climb into Donald Trump’s apartment?
Haven’t seen anyone here mention something that seems pertinent. I’ve read in several articles that a witness said she saw and heard interactions between the child and his mother before he went over the barrier:
"Witness Kim O’Connor said she heard the boy say he wanted to get in the water with the gorillas. She said the boy’s mother was with several other young children.
“The mother’s like, ‘No, you’re not. No, you’re not,’” O’Connor told WLWT-TV."
That’s from an article here.
I get that the mother had other children to look after also but if this kid actually was telling her he wanted to go in the water with the gorillas, you might think she’d keep a little more of an eye on him or even take him by the hand. I agree with others saying the zoo should have had more precautions in place, like a second barrier, but the fact is they did not and this mother could easily see what the barrier situation was (and wasn’t), including when the child was expressing his wish to get inside with the gorillas. I dunno, it’s real hard not to think she was seriously negligent here.
That same article and others I’ve read has the zoo officials saying the gorilla was NOT behaving in a threatening manner to the child, though technically he was “dragging” the kid at one point. From the description it sounds like the gorilla may have been trying to remove the child to an area away from all the shouts and screams of people watching, possibly even to protect the child. I’m wondering if more video is going to turn up of the entire incident. Seems likely, given smartphones. I hope eventually we can see for ourselves what exactly was going on just before they shot the gorilla.
I so wish they could have tried the tranq first. Even with the risk that it might’ve agitated the gorilla. I’m one of those apparently cold people who in this situation does not automatically think the kid’s life has enough more value than the gorilla’s to justify killing the gorilla immediately rather than trying something else first.
Yes, exactly. The “bolt cutter” standard would ruin zoos, one way or another.
Just read a new article quoting a Facebook post the mother made. She is named, so I guess she’s not going the anonymity route. In it she expresses anger at anyone saying she was negligent and says all her friends know she keeps a “tight watch” on her children. There’s a bunch of stuff about how god watched her kid until he was rescued and all’s well because god this and god that and thanks to everyone who helped but “especially to god for being the awesome god that he is.” Article here.
Yeah, sorry lady but no. Again a situation where people afterward talk about how wonderful god is because he saved them or their loved one from a terrible situation. You see this alot after hurricanes and tornadoes too. People thank god for not being killed and say it’s because of god being so wonderful and so forth, totally ignoring meanwhile everyone else who was not so “blessed” by god. How come this lady’s awesome god didn’t just keep her kid from getting in with the gorilla in the first place? It just sounds so dumb to me. I have even less sympathy for this woman now than I did before, which is difficult because I had very little before.
I just don’t understand the rush to kill the animal. The gorilla was with the child for ten minutes without attacking. I wish they had given the agitated gorilla time to calm down after zoo staff removed the crowd. The staff might have been able to safely remove the child like its been done in other cases. I linked a couple of them last night. Today the news is also mentioning those cases where zoos saved the kid without killing the gorilla…
Shooting should have been the last option and not option #1. Much like SWAT teams do with humans, they could keep a rifle aimed at the gorilla. Drop him in his tracks if he makes any aggressive move towards the child. That’s probably what was done in prior cases.
To the best of my knowledge highways are not marketed as areas for children to come to play, learn, and be entertained.
OTOH when playgrounds for preschoolers are built near busy roads there is great care put into the design to help ensure safety, with fences, gates, stop signs, reduced speed limits, etc. If someone decided to build a preschooler playground right next to the known to be dangerous busy highway and commuter train tracks (because preschoolers love watching cars, trucks, and trains), damn straight I’d expect a barrier between the play area and the highway and the tracks adequate to stop even a determined unsupervised preschooler from running onto the road or tracks.
Kalo, how does a child climb through a wire fence? Unless it is negligently not intact. 20 foot drop also should be both ways so that it also is a 20 foot climb.
It seems bizarre to me to insist that designing an enclosure that can defeat a 4 year old is an impossibly burdensome standard for the zoo to meet.
After all, I assume that several species of primates are better at escaping than even the most determined 4 year old, and the zoo regularly designs enclosures to keep them in.
While we can’t really comment on the parent’s culpability without knowing the facts, the concept that the parent bears the blame for not keeping a constant watch on the kid defies reality. A zoo is a place that expects kids, including 4 year olds, to visit; they should either plan on 4 year olds escaping from parental supervision, or exclude them from the attraction.