Toddler falls in gorilla pit

[Ryika]

Query: if I say "God willing" in regards to a future hope or concern, do you think I'm actually hoping for holy magic to make it so out of the blue*? If so, why? If not, do you default to that assumption with other people? Why or why not?

*Or "Thank goodness/God" in regards to something that has happened/holy magic made it so.

I have no problem with people referencing Gods or other religious things, what I have a problem with is that she's literally thanking a God for "doing nothing" to resolve the situation. I mean, let's imagine for a moment God exists and that she had her hand in all of this, what was her thinking progress?

"Oh, look. Baby and Gorilla. Mhh... I tell you, Gorilla, to not brutally kill that kid for no reason and instead just drag it through the water a few times. Don't worry, I'll make it so his bones don't break, even if you're being a little rough with him. Just don't do anything too drastic until the other humans come and... well, salvage this situation."

Like... what? If a god had a hand in this then she's a pathetic, sadistic, evil - or powerless - entity that needs not to be thanked.

 

[Farm Boy]

Alright. So you're of the opinion it has to be holymagic wow wow, not the years of training and quick action of kind people sacrificing something important to them, or God is an inappropriate reference. That at least makes sense.

 

[Ryika]

What? Obviously no god protected her child because no god exists, but she seems to be a believer, and as a believer saying that "God protected the child" is insanity based on what happened. That child wasn't protected, bad things happened to him. He fell down a ledge and was dragged around the place by a gorilla. Then men came and made sure the bad things stop. At the cost of ending the life of the Gorilla.

It's like whenever something bad happens and doesn't turn into the worst possible outcome there's a reason to praise god.

 

[Flying Pig]

The track record of that enclosure shows that it was negligence on the part of the parent that caused the incident though, not any failure on the zoo's part. Plus, they have addressed or are addressing issues with the enclosure as the currently have that area sealed off (at least they did when I took my daughter there for her birthday on Monday).

It might seem too obvious to say, but probably needs to be said - accidents like this happen when wrong actions meet circumstances that make them a problem. To use a happier analogy, if I went out today in a t-shirt and caught a cold, I might fairly say that I caught a cold because I went out in a t-shirt. However, wearing a t-shirt was only a problem because it's freezing cold today. Likewise, the parent was certainly negligent, but that negligence was only a problem because the enclosure was designed such that a child could get into it without, it seems, much effort. I'm willing to accept that you can't plan against all sorts of negligence, but children and drunk/stupid people climbing around is a very basic thing that safety barriers of all sorts are supposed to guard against. What a safety system designer should be thinking is how to set the circumstances such that negligent, stupid or unlucky actions don't matter, and can't cause a catastrophe.

The example that springs easily to my own mind is parachuting. The day before a jump, everyone gets a refresher of their parachute training, what to do, and so forth. Before you get on the aircraft, you set up your equipment and have it checked. When the red light goes on, you hook up to the line, the man behind you checks that everything is fastened securely and correctly, and then you jump. If the parachute fails to open, you open your reserve. There's so much potential for failure - what is called redundancy - built into that. If you've forgotten the procedure, you're being refreshed. If you set your kit up wrong, you have it checked and corrected. If you hook on incorrectly, or something comes undone during the flight, someone else checks you. If you somehow still manage to have a problem with your primary parachute, you have the reserve. A lot of people can make mistakes in that process, and still nobody dies.

You might design the system another way - after the refresher training, everyone puts their own equipment on, checks their own, and jumps. In that case, if someone hooks up incorrectly and falls a lot faster than intended, you could rightly say that their own negligence caused what happened, and that it was no fault of the jump master, the officers in charge, or anybody else. However, that wouldn't be a productive way for the people designing that system to think. They should be thinking 'how can we make it so that he can do that, and it still not cause a problem?' The same ought to apply to the zoo enclosure. How can they make it so that children running around, or (as in this case) briefly slipping out of direct supervision, are not in danger?

 

[Farm Boy]

What? Obviously no god protected her child because no god exists, but she seems to be a believer, and as a believer saying that "God protected the child" is insanity based on what happened. That child wasn't protected, bad things happened to him. He fell down a ledge and was dragged around the place by a gorilla. Then men came and made sure the bad things stop. At the cost of ending the life of the Gorilla.

It's like whenever something bad happens and doesn't turn into the worst possible outcome there's a reason to praise god.

That is a terrifically ham-handed understanding of the Will of God by the People of God.

But hey, maybe she's an idiot or super literal magical thinker. It's plausible. They are around. It's just ungenerous. Especially when it takes a 3 year-old approximately 2 seconds of parental inattention to get themselves killed in something like a parking lot. Making the evidence of idiocy somewhat lacking.

 

[Commodore]

It might seem too obvious to say, but probably needs to be said - accidents like this happen when wrong actions meet circumstances that make them a problem. To use a happier analogy, if I went out today in a t-shirt and caught a cold, I might fairly say that I caught a cold because I went out in a t-shirt. However, wearing a t-shirt was only a problem because it's freezing cold today. Likewise, the parent was certainly negligent, but that negligence was only a problem because the enclosure was designed such that a child could get into it without, it seems, much effort. I'm willing to accept that you can't plan against all sorts of negligence, but children and drunk/stupid people climbing around is a very basic thing that safety barriers of all sorts are supposed to guard against. What a safety system designer should be thinking is how to set the circumstances such that negligent, stupid or unlucky actions don't matter, and can't cause a catastrophe.

Okay, I'm with you there. However, I don't think the Cincinnati Zoo deserves all the "OMG, this zoo has terrible enclosures!" outrage over just one, highly publicized, incident. I'm not saying you, or anyone on this forum is engaging in that outrage; but people here in Cincinnati are, and it's getting a little ridiculous.

 

[Kyriakos]

Not seeing the outrage over killing the gorilla. It just had to be done to avoid ending up with the toddler being dead or brain-damaged or similar. It's not like this is the zoos in Denmark where they shot animals just cause they could not afford to send them to other (very distant) hosting zoos

 

[Manfred Belheim]

^Well, then it is also a subjective matter if humans really should not be killed if one feels like killing them

Yes. And?

 

[Kyriakos]

^Such a stance just makes one a psychopath is all. It doesn't follow that it is healthy to be so misanthropic. Besides, disliking others is normal, even up to hating some if the context presents such emotion. It is not the same to be ok with murdering people, though. Nor to sacrifice a human (in this case just a toddler as well) so as to not shoot down an animal which likely would not let go without causing major harm.

 

[Namor]

The parents should be held monetarily liable for the whole incident though, it's the will of God.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

^Such a stance just makes one a psychopath is all. It doesn't follow that it is healthy to be so misanthropic. Besides, disliking others is normal, even up to hating some if the context presents such emotion. It is not the same to be ok with murdering people, though. Nor to sacrifice a human (in this case just a toddler as well) so as to not shoot down an animal which likely would not let go without causing major harm.

Again... so? Are you denying that psychopaths exist?

 

[whyidie]

They're not idiots exactly, they just sold their souls for clickbait.

They also now seem to have a quota of 20 articles about Donald Trump a day.

Yes they did. They used to be pretty solid. Now they may as well just merge with Slate.

Impressed with the parents response so far. No blame game or victimization, not only have they not tried to sue the zoo they're re-directing donations to the zoo and expressed sympathy at the way things went down.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

And this was the only incident with that particular enclosure in that 35 years. One incident in 35 years hardly means the enclosure was insufficient.

This whole unfortunate incident was caused by poor parenting skills, not poor zoo design. That's why the mother of that child is being investigated by Cincinnati Police to determine if she should bear any criminal liability for the gorilla's death since it was her negligence as a parent that directly led to the gorilla being shot.

I still have doubts. While the parent should shoulder the individual blame here, I can't envision a scenario where a young child can so trivially enter the enclosure inside of a minute or two to be well-designed.

You can definitely make a case that a long track record of enclosures with this level of security is sufficient, and that this scenario is rare enough to not merit the costs of superior designs. After all, most people don't willfully endanger themselves and children can also jump out a window of a 3rd story building within a minute, suffering worse injuries than this case (pretty good chance to die outright from that).

Yet, if a sub-5 year old child dives out the window on a sudden whim, do you go after the parents for legal reasons? That's unreasonable. Restraining the child sufficiently to have absolutely no chance of it happening would constitute abuse also.

If you're not willing to blame the zoo based on a 35 year track record of avoiding this kind of incident, why are you willing to blame a parent who took said track record for granted and was likely less negligent in action than multiple other people in attendance that day, only to be an extremely unfortunate and unlikely outlier? Should losing track of a child for 30 seconds be something punishable by law in the general sense, or is it somehow rational to be punished for rare adverse outcomes on conduct identical or better than millions of people without punishment?

If we're concluding this is an unfortunate accident and that the design is generally good enough to live with the consequences, then fine. That's a reasonable stance to take after I saw you make the point, but take it consistently .

 

[civvver]

It's clearly a subjective matter, not an objective one as you describe it.

No it's not, humans lives are objectively more important than animals. If you disagree well then you might as well stop breathing because your mere existence affects animals in a negative way, unless you literally live in a jungle never use fire and eat leaves, ie live like an animal.

The only time where we may say oh these particular circumstances require us to side with animals should be in the case where the eco system is negatively affect to the point that it hurts humans. Animals are resources and we need to protect them as such just like anything in the environment. Beyond that why do we really care what happens to them? They aren't our species, they aren't sentient like we are. We shouldn't abuse them, but there's a clear line of succession here with humans on top. It's evolution. I sometimes feel like people are going backwards in that thinking.

What else did you expect from Salon.com? It's like buzzfeed, just more racist.
Look at the comments, not even their own readers buy this nonsense.

If anything I'm surprised that the article doesn't try to spin that into some sort of "They were so quick to shoot the Gorilla because h was black!"-story.

I think the child was also black so it kind of falls apart there. I could definitely see people adopting this angle if it was a white child though. Black gorilla dies to save white child's life lol.

 

[Namor]

Apes not being sentient is a highly contested debate, the same with a number of other species.

The thing which is probably unique to humans is language, everything else is still being studied.

 

[civvver]

Apes not being sentient is a highly contested debate, the same with a number of other species.

The thing which is probably unique to humans is language, everything else is still being studied.

Either way it doesn't matter, humans evolved/were created to be on top. We're the dominant species. There is nothing immoral or wrong about that, yet people try to make it so. Animals are resources for us to use. We should be good stewards of those resources of course, not abuse them, ensure their survival for the future as much as reasonably possible etc, but to put them on the same level as human life is ridiculous. It's hypocritical anyway cus all those people in peta still do a bunch of things that impact animals such as live in houses which take up space in fields where a bunch of bunnies could be living instead. You know what I mean? It's like some sort of guilt they overplay. Religious people do the same thing with religion and guilt, they act stupid hypocritical ways cus they feel guilty about stuff they shouldn't feel guilty about cus of some religious rule.

I still have doubts. While the parent should shoulder the individual blame here, I can't envision a scenario where a young child can so trivially enter the enclosure inside of a minute or two to be well-designed.

You can definitely make a case that a long track record of enclosures with this level of security is sufficient, and that this scenario is rare enough to not merit the costs of superior designs. After all, most people don't willfully endanger themselves and children can also jump out a window of a 3rd story building within a minute, suffering worse injuries than this case (pretty good chance to die outright from that).

Yet, if a sub-5 year old child dives out the window on a sudden whim, do you go after the parents for legal reasons? That's unreasonable. Restraining the child sufficiently to have absolutely no chance of it happening would constitute abuse also.

If you're not willing to blame the zoo based on a 35 year track record of avoiding this kind of incident, why are you willing to blame a parent who took said track record for granted and was likely less negligent in action than multiple other people in attendance that day, only to be an extremely unfortunate and unlikely outlier? Should losing track of a child for 30 seconds be something punishable by law in the general sense, or is it somehow rational to be punished for rare adverse outcomes on conduct identical or better than millions of people without punishment?

If we're concluding this is an unfortunate accident and that the design is generally good enough to live with the consequences, then fine. That's a reasonable stance to take after I saw you make the point, but take it consistently .

This was my feeling. People are saying well it's a zoo you should keep a closer eye on you kid, but dude most people assume a place like a zoo is reasonably safe. You don't want your kid to get lost, but to think oh it's dangerous here cus they could jump a fence into the animals, that thought doesn't really cross many people's mind.

And like you said with the window thing, I think of traffic and parking lots. If a kid slips a parents grasp, runs headlong through a parking lot and gets hit by a car and dies, are we holding anyone responsible? If the driver attempted to stop, who's really to blame? It's a freak accident, but there's a reason we call them accidents, cus no one intended for it to happen.

 

[Ryika]

I think the child was also black so it kind of falls apart there. I could definitely see people adopting this angle if it was a white child though. Black gorilla dies to save white child's life lol.

Oh, it is? Literally didn't notice that when I watched the videos. Talk about not seeing race, I have reached the state of enlightenment.

There is nothing immoral or wrong about that, yet people try to make it so. Animals are resources for us to use. We should be good stewards of those resources of course, not abuse them, ensure their survival for the future as much as reasonably possible etc, but to put them on the same level as human life is ridiculous.

Think about this though:
Imagine huge aliens the size of a planet came to earth. With their little, sperm-like child. That child enters our atmosphere and then lands in New Jersey, wiggles its way through the city, killing everybody in the process and then digging itself towards the core of our earth.

Of course first everybody would cheer because New Jersey doesn't exist anymore, but then the big space aliens realize that the core of the planet is extremely hot and that their child will die if they don't crack the earth in halves, destroying our world and killing us all in the process.

Does that logic still hold true, or did it change because we're no longer the superior species in that example?

 

[Old Hippy]

Okay, I'm with you there. However, I don't think the Cincinnati Zoo deserves all the "OMG, this zoo has terrible enclosures!" outrage over just one, highly publicized, incident. I'm not saying you, or anyone on this forum is engaging in that outrage; but people here in Cincinnati are, and it's getting a little ridiculous.

well they need to fix their enclosures now
going on their track record, they don't stop toddlers from getting in

 

[Manfred Belheim]

No it's not, humans lives are objectively more important than animals. If you disagree well then you might as well stop breathing because your mere existence affects animals in a negative way, unless you literally live in a jungle never use fire and eat leaves, ie live like an animal.

I didn't say I didn't believe it, I just said it was subjective, which it is. Furthermore, it's quite possible (indeed probably quite natural) for MY life to be more important to me than any other human or animal, but that doesn't necessarily imply that all human life is or should be equally important to me. And I'm sure I've had a few pets who would have disagreed with you about how I affected their lives too.

 

[FriendlyFire]

If you're not willing to blame the zoo based on a 35 year track record of avoiding this kind of incident, why are you willing to blame a parent who took said track record for granted and was likely less negligent in action than multiple other people in attendance that day, only to be an extremely unfortunate and unlikely outlier? Should losing track of a child for 30 seconds be something punishable by law in the general sense, or is it somehow rational to be punished for rare adverse outcomes on conduct identical or better than millions of people without punishment?

Just put a sign up "Open enclosure" WARNING jumping inside can cause death by Gorilla.

well they need to fix their enclosures now
going on their track record, they don't stop toddlers from getting in

The rail has been upgraded to a fence now, sadly this dose block the view guess you cant have it both ways.
That or mandatory leashes for all toddlers at the zoo.