On 31 August 1986, five-year-old Levan Merritt fell into the gorilla enclosure and lost consciousness. Jambo stood guard over the boy when he was unconscious, placing himself between the boy and other gorillas in what ethologists analyze as a protective gesture. He later stroked the unconscious boy’s back.
Dicks out
The trouble and difference with the Harambe situation is that he was disobeying his handlers and riled up by what he thought was a crowd angry at the kid(he likely wouldn’t have thought the crowd was scared of what he might do, since he knew he was being helpful and didn’t have presence of mind to consistently realise others might have different opinions than his own). So he wouldn’t let go of the kid, and would have likely been defensive if handlers tried to come in and get the kid. He also was large enough that if they tranquilized him, he could have easily crushed the kid just by slowly passing out on him. They unfortunately had to take the only guarantee they had and shoot him at a moment when he was far enough from the kid that he wouldn’t fall on him.
Harambe also didn’t have any previous experience with taking care of kids, gorilla or otherwise. And believe me, that makes a huge difference. While the kid ended up mostly ok physically, he was dragged around by his ankle, through water and over rough terrain.
Nobody wants to kill a zoo animal. Especially not beloved ones. Especially not while they are trying to be nice.
If the crowd would have just shut up it would probably have been fine. At first Hatambe was acting like the gorillia in this video.
Ok, convince an entire crowd that they have nothing to fear and everything is ok and they can calm down. And do it quickly because the boy is being dragged around like a rag doll, which seems to be having the opposite effect.
He wasn’t at first though. The full video Harambe was acting concerned, checking if the boy was OK, etc. But you have everyone screaming and shouting, creating a much worse situation .
You can imagine the reverse a gorilla baby falls to you. The gorillas are calm so you help them, vs every gorilla launching a loud noisy assault like they are goinf to attack…You’d be like fuck nah time to run.
I don’t know what you trying to say should have been done. What else could have been done?
Nothing people are hysterical herd minds. It played out how it only could I think.
Had everyone just gone hush quiet the park staff might have had a chance to move harambe away.