“When you dart an animal, anesthetic doesn’t work in one second, it works over a period of a few minutes to 10 minutes,” he said. Thane Maynard, the executive director of the Cincinnati Zoo, justified the decision of his emergency response team in a press conference Monday, explaining that the primary concern was for the 4-year-old boy’s life. “The gorilla enclosure should have been surrounded by a secondary barrier between the humans and the animals to prevent exactly this type of incident.” “Yet again, captivity has taken an animal’s life,” the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said in a statement. Visitors have also been leaving cards and flowers next to a statue outside the zoo’s Gorilla World exhibit, which has been temporarily closed after the incident. Several celebrities also voiced their opinions about the incident on social media.ĭozens gathered at a vigil Monday afternoon to mourn Harambe, although it was made clear that the vigil was not a protest against the zoo. silverback or dominant male, would father more gorillas.Īnimal-rights activists have been up in arms, blaming the parents of the boy for not watching him closely enough as well as the zoo for not having adequate safety measures and shooting the gorilla dead rather than tranquilizing him. Their population in the wild is estimated to be less than 175,000, according to the Cincinnati Zoo, with 765 more reportedly residing in zoos across the globe. Western-lowland gorillas are a critically endangered species, with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reporting that their numbers have reduced by 60% over the past 20 to 25 years. The 17-year-old male western-lowland gorilla, Harambe, was born at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Texas and moved to Cincinnati two years ago for breeding purposes, his former caretaker Jerry Stones told TIME on Sunday.
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