Child falls into Gorilla enclosure. Public upset with...

The animal love is near universal - even people who agree that it had to be put down are sad about it. But someone had to go digging for the kid's father's criminal record, and he wasn't even at the zoo that day. LOL

By Jay Whatever Go To PostMaybe your particular brand of conversational energy might be better spent confronting the guy in the Yahoo comments section who suggested that they let the gorilla keep the nigger baby. That's the world I live in - the one where people seem to think more about the rights of relatively mindless animals over human black lives wholesale. This is not a mental luxury I can afford most of the time. Kudos to you if you can keep it in the abstract. I can't.

I said at the top of the thread that it's unfortunate that the gorilla died. I'm not gonna give the animal any more consideration.

Why must it be an either/or situation? We can confront multiple ills at once, rather than retreating to a smaller field of struggle.

The sorts of people you're alluding to - the most noxious of the racists - operate through an ideology wherein the maligned 'races' are reducible to the merely animal. First, you disregard the non-human, then you herd the foreign, the different, the other to that non-human outside.

Was not the concentration camp the extension of slaughterhouses to humanity? Was not the subjugation of slaves the expansion of the category of beasts of burden to the species Homo sapiens? Breeding and purity, use and disposability - these are the realms of the human treatment of non-human animals which have found applicability in disputes, fissures, and injustices within our own species. Is it any surprise that, like zoonotic diseases, they tend towards jumping the species barrier again and again and again. We've ignored them at our own peril.

Let me reiterate that I'm not trying to ignore the child, especially as if he were some sort of racialized excrement. But I also refuse to ignore the gorilla, an imprisoned creature whose entire severely-endangered species has suffered unfathomable destruction at the hands of innumerable human beings.

None of this is abstract; none of this simply floats around in some sophistic aether. It has real, direct effects on so many lives, human and non-human, every day.

By blackace Go To PostI mean when it comes down to it most animals protect their young when in danger and man has always been a communal animal.

It's sad that the gorilla died but to be honest it's sadder that the gorilla has gotten more love and support than Martin when he got murdered or any other such case.

I think it's a bit of an overstatement to claim that Martin or Brown or Rice were ignored when, in the aftermath of their deaths, we witnessed the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement that is increasingly becoming a positive force in politics. Moreover, like I noted above, this shouldn't be a matter of one or the other; both BLM, for example, and animal rights activists can and, I would argue, should work together.

Also, I'm not disputing the fact that humans tend to communally protect their young. I even understand that that may predispose us to a certain anthropocentrism. I do, however, think we're capable of much more than that.

Harambe himself, according to some of the accounts I've read and my own non-expert viewing of the limited video, was possibly acting in defense of the child, protecting it from the mass of screeching nearly-hairless apes on the other side of his enclosure. What does it say that his transspecies empathy seems to have been stronger than some of our own? Just an animal, right?

BLM is under attack more than it is appreciated on a daily basis... Shit even looking at this incident attacks on the family's character is outlandish.. So I don't think it's an overstatement that the gorilla is getting more love than an unarmed boy murdered by a random guy who wanted to play police man.

In hindsight you can watch tapes and try break down what the gorilla was thinking but at that time the gorilla was flinging a child around by his belt in an enclosure.... I am no ape expert but I have never seen them treat their young like but again no expert on the matter.

All you can hope is that people learn from this... making enclosures safer and how to react better...

so a kid was killed by an alligator... but the news covered it differently