Fuck that gorilla

You’ve all heard this story already, right? Kid falls into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo. Big silverback named Harambe ends up dead, shot by zoo employees to save the boy.

This story, deserving no more than a “Wow that’s wild, glad the kid is OK” type response, is instead currently blowing up the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, because of course it is. So of course, I have decided to come out of my long self imposed exile in order to add my voice to the fray.

And what my voice is saying is, fuck you all. Seriously, just fuck you all. Where shall I begin?

To everybody whining that the gorilla shouldn’t have been shot: 

Fuck you.

As soon as you come up with a better method of assuring the safety of that child and the zoo staff that works faster and more effectively than a 30.06 round, you can go ahead, invent a time machine, go back in time, train the zoo staff with it, and save Harambe. But shit, if you’re going to do that, you might as well just grab the kid before he falls in the damn enclosure in the first place, asshole.

The gorilla wasn’t doing anything wrong!

Fuck you.

Objectively, this is true, but completely irrelevant. The gorilla was being a gorilla.  Unfortunately, he happened to be going about his business of being a gorilla while a human child was too close. So yeah, it’s absolutely not his fault he got shot. But he got shot just the same, and it was still the right decision.

Harambe was protecting the child/just playing!

Fuck you.

First of all, stop projecting. When you bare your teeth, it’s called a smile. When literally any other animal on the planet does it, it means “look what I’m about to eat you with.” You don’t fucking know what that gorilla was “thinking.”  Nobody does. And even if the best primate researcher on the planet happened to be standing there to interpret his actions for us, a bullet was still the proper response. It does not matter if he was “only playing” or “protecting” the child. He could have easily “protected” him to death in an eye blink. He could have crushed the kid without even realizing it. What do you propose the zoo staff do? Even if you’re somehow completely sure Harambe was “playing” what is your game plan here? See if he’ll play catch with you and throw you the kid? Think about it for half a second and you’ll realize how much it doesn’t matter.

But it was a rare mountain gorilla, there’s only 95,000 of them left!

Fuck you.

That is the dumbest argument I’ve heard in my life. So now there’s only 94,999.  I’m sorry, a human child was in danger. Here’s a simple chart I made showing the relative importance of human lives vs other animals lives:

You can’t see the dot for the other animals because it’s off the bottom of the chart like a mile.  Ain’t nobody got time to draw a mile long line in Paint.

I don’t care if Harambe was the last of his species.  Bullet in the brain pan, and it’s not even a close decision.

It’s the mother’s fault, she wasn’t watching the kid!

Fuck you.

Oh, and also, irrelevant. It literally does not matter how the kid ended up there, the gorilla ends up dead in every scenario. Kids do stupid shit. That’s why they’re called kids. When I was a kid I fell out of a tree and caught my ankle in the crook of a branch on the way down and hung there screaming until my neighbor (who happened to be the closest) came running over and got me down. Was it my mom’s fault for not watching me more closely?  Shit no. What’s she supposed to do, stare at me 24/7? Screw that.

Stop judging the mom. It’s not like she was dangling the kid over the edge or something. The kid did what kids do, which, as you may remember me saying a paragraph ago, is STUPID SHIT. He crawled through a fence and fell down a bank. This is only news because there happened to be a gorilla at the bottom of the bank.

The zoo should have higher fences, it’s dumb how easy it is for a kid to get in with the gorillas!

Fuck yo– oh hang on. You actually do have a point here.

It IS pretty silly how easy it apparently is for a four year old to get into an enclosure with a 450 pound mountain gorilla. Somebody should probably fix that. But unless you steal the time machine from the people building it to take their fool proof instant gorilla sedation system back to train the zoo staff, fixing the fences isn’t going to save Harambe.

That’s all I got time for today kids, consider yourselves chastised.