A Gorilla Dies at the Cincinnati Zoo - Who is to Blame?

A few months ago, a zookeeper at the Palm Beach Zoo in Florida was killed by a tiger. The circumstances surrounding her death were not immediately forthcoming, but it was revealed early-on that zoo officials elected to tranquilize the animal rather than shoot it as it stood over the woman’s body. This resulted in a ten minute delay in allowing first responders to reach the woman. Condemnation of the zoo for not taking quicker action was furious. Fast forward a couple of months. A three-year-old boy falls into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo and is dragged around for ten minutes by a four hundred pound, adult male gorilla. Zoo officials elected to shoot the animal rather than tranquilize it, in order to retrieve the child. Now people are criticizing this zoo for shooting to save a person and not attempting to tranquilize the animal. Zoos, it would appear, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Who is to blame for the gorilla incident—the zoo, the parents, the child? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But here is what I do know. I worked with gorillas for forty years at three different zoos. Gorillas are gentle but unpredictable animals and they are immensely powerful. I have also seen hundreds of animals tranquilized and know how unreliable this can be. Tranquilizer guns are not nearly as accurate as rifles. A miss is not at all uncommon. Darts can misfire or an animal can pull out the dart before it injects a full dose. And an animal under stress can counteract the effects of the drug, even if it does receive the full dose. Attempting to tranquilize an animal can take an agonizingly long time, if it works at all.

It is a sad fact that, in today’s world, we find ourselves constantly second guessed and making decisions based on anticipated reactions on social and in mainstream media. I am sure the officials at the Cincinnati zoo made the right decision in saving that little boy, and I am also sure that they are shedding buckets of tears over their decision. To the zoo people who cared for him every day, that gorilla was part of their family—think about pulling the trigger on your own dog or cat.

So, what is the take away in all this? Maybe the zoo needs to beef-up its barriers. Maybe parents need to keep a close eye on their children when they enter a place where danger might lurk—like a public playground, a swimming pool, or a zoo. As for the little boy, there’s not much to be done about that. As the oldest of four boys with four sons and four grandsons of my own, I recall many times that, if I turned my back for a moment, someone would be too high up that tree or too far out in the lake—and we had the broken bones and stitches to prove it.

Ian Porter and gorilla 'Shani' (Toledo Zoo, 1992)

The sad fact is, accidents happen every day. Sometimes the results are tragic and often there is no one to blame. To quote one of my favorite children’s authors, Lemony Snicket, maybe it was just A Series of Unfortunate Events.