Officials said Monday that the mother of the 3-year-old boy who fell into a gorilla’s enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo will not face criminal charges. What she has faced, however, is the ignorance and cruelty of her fellow humans, angry that the gorilla was shot and killed.
The prosecutor’s call was obviously correct. Witnesses described the woman as attentive. What happened was a shame, but hardly a crime.
The public response, however, was abhorrent. Others, particularly on social media, have condemned her as a bad parent and blamed the death of the gorilla on her inattention.
That is not only inaccurate and judgmental, it is cruel. The woman could have lost her son. She does not deserve to be ridiculed and insulted.
Doing so flies in the face of what everyone who has ever been around children understands. As Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters put it Monday, “If anyone does not believe a 3-year-old can scamper off very quickly, they’ve never had kids.”
Every parent has a tale about how their little one got lost or got into some precarious position that could have turned ugly. Few involve gorillas, of course, and enough tragedies do happen that even the happy outcomes are recognized as frightening near-misses. But no decent person would shame a mother frantically searching for a missing child.
Nor would any thinking observer question the real danger facing that boy in Cincinnati or the split-second decision to kill the gorilla. After the child got into the exhibit, the gorilla was seen picking up and dragging him. Who knows what its intentions might have been, but this was a male gorilla weighing more that 400 pounds.
Zoo Director Than Maynard put it this way, “We’re talking about an animal I’ve seen crush a coconut with one hand. The child was being dragged around, his head was banging on concrete.”
Shooting the gorilla was necessary. Using that tragedy as a jumping off point for a larger argument about zoos in general would be legitimate. Blaming it on a mother who just had the scare of a lifetime is not.
