Just be quiet

If we have zoos to educate us about animals, why are we still uneducated about animals?

I'm in no position to question the decision by workers at the Cincinnati Zoo to kill a gorilla, because I don't share their responsibility to provide safety to zoo visitors. I also can't say anything about the parents of the boy who fell into the gorilla's enclosure at the zoo. I'm just grateful that I somehow managed to keep my own kid from running into traffic when he was little.

What grinds my gears is the screeching and hollering by the onlookers at the Cincinnati Zoo. To me, it looked as though the gorilla had no intention of harming the boy. He even pulled the boy's pants up for him, for crying out loud. It looked as though the gorilla became agitated by all of the noise raised by the onlookers.

The best thing we can do for most animals is to simply leave them alone. I don't much like the idea of keeping them trapped in zoos, but I can see some justification for zoos if they can educate us about animals. If we don't have enough sense to realize that a silverback is a gentle creature that just wants to help a child, we haven't learned anything. That gorilla need not have died if people had simply noticed that the boy was not in danger, and kept quiet and waited until zoo workers could extract him from the enclosure.