Honor Harambe by working to save gorillas

I don’t understand the outrage over shooting a gorilla that dragged a 3-year-old boy through a moat.

By now, every human in the world with access to a TV has probably seen the video of the frightened toddler who fell into a gorilla habitat at the Cincinnati Zoo. I’ve watched it twice, and both times I reached the same conclusion: The ape had to die.

Let’s put aside for a moment how it happened. Maybe the zoo should rethink those natural habitats and keep gorillas in cages. Perhaps the mother of four is unfit because she took her eyes off one of her kids for a few seconds. Maybe the toddler is to blame for being too curious about what was going on behind those bushes. And of course, let’s not let the dad off the hook. He has a criminal past, as at least one news outlet has reported, and wasn’t even at the zoo when his son needed him most.

Regardless of the ridiculous accusations floating around, here’s the bottom line: A helpless child ended up in a silverback gorilla’s front yard, while the animal and his friends were home.

Now, let’s make it personal. How would you react if you suddenly found yourself face to face with a 450-pound male gorilla? How many people would be willing to wait calmly while someone tried to determine if the gorilla had grabbed your arm in a friendly gesture or to sling you back and forth against a rock?

My guess is that you’d do the same thing that I would – scream at the top of my lungs for someone to immediately take him out before he took me out.

It might appear that I’m a cold-hearted animal-hater, but I assure you that’s not the case. In fact, I’m a firm believer that animals should never be used to entertain humans. By most standards, I’m probably at the extreme.

I don’t like zoos. I hate when whale sharks – the largest fish in the sea – are shipped to an aquarium and housed in a glass enclosure. I refuse to attend a circus where animals perform stunts while spectators munch on peanuts and popcorn. I wouldn’t even take a ride on a horse-drawn carriage down Michigan Avenue. And I’ve been known to call the police when I see a dog tied to a tree in someone’s backyard or left outside in a snowstorm.

I considered it a huge redemption for humanity when Ringling Brothers bowed to public pressure and agreed to retire its circus elephants. I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard that wildlife officials were shutting down the infamous Tiger Temple in Thailand, where tourists get to pet drugged animals while posing for pictures.

I feel sorry for Harambe, who had to die simply because he was being held captive in a place where he never belonged.

But I also realize that what happened at the Cincinnati Zoo last weekend was real. It wasn’t a scene in a movie where the ape is shot to death before falling from the Empire State Building.

I’m not saying that Harambe was a monster, but he wasn’t King Kong, the fictional beast who eventually was tamed by the beautiful young woman who had been offered to him as a sacrifice.

And Harambe, though raised in captivity, was no Binti Jua. Twenty years ago, Binti drew national attention when she cradled a boy who had fallen into her enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo, near Chicago. She lifted the child and carried him to the safety of zookeepers, all while her own baby gorilla clung onto her back.

Binti was hand-raised in the zoo and had been trained to care for her baby, even learning to take him to zoo doctors for exams.

As much as some people would like to believe that Harambe was trying to protect the child from the screaming humans overhead, no one could ever know his actual plan.

The most sensible thing I’ve heard so far is from the man who knew Harambe best – his caretaker for 15 years. Jerry Stones cut Harambe’s umbilical cord when he was born at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas, and took care of him before the gorilla was transferred to Cincinnati two years ago for a breeding program.

“Ninety-nine percent of people, on both sides of the fence, pro or con, don’t have a clue what they’re talking about and I’m not going to comment on it. I wasn’t there and they weren’t either,” Stones told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Instead of assigning blame, Stones started the Harambe Fund, a crowdfunding campaign to help endangered gorillas in the wild.

With western lowland silverback gorillas like Harambe critically endangered – fewer than 100,000 are in existence – I can’t think of a better way to pay respect. The money will go to the Mbeli Bai Study, a long-running project to research and protect western lowland gorillas in the Republic of Congo, where they’re severely threatened by poachers and the loss of their habitat.

For those who really care about gorillas, here’s a good way to keep them in the wild where they belong. And what better way is there to pay tribute to a gorilla named Harambe – a variation of the Kenyan rallying cry “harambee.”

In Swahili, that means “pull together.”

Dahleen Glanton is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.