Shot That Killed Gorilla Harambe Heard Around the World

A day before the silverback Harambe was shot dead by a Cincinnati Zoo sharpshooter to protect the 3-year-old boy who had suddenly fallen into his den, the Western lowland gorilla mourned around the world was celebrated on his 17th birthday.

In observance Friday, May 27, of what everyone expected to be the beginning of Harambe’s 18th year of life — the year he would become a father, perhaps? — the Cincinnati Zoo posted a picture of the muscled silverback with deep, penetrating eyes on its Facebook page and invited everyone to wish him well.

Posts almost squealing with delight followed, some punctuated with obligatory balloon, birthday cake and other emojis, others gushing about the 419-pound gorilla’s ripped pecs and brawny good looks. And the slightly upturned mouth? Swoon, seriously, right now.

Then, with the jarring force and speed of a healthy gorilla like Harambe, the comments changed from airy lightness to rabid invective and the internet more or less lost its mind over the ape’s killing.

Everyone, it seems, had become an overnight expert on gorilla behavior, on tranquilizer dosages, on zoo architecture, on parenting, on everything that could and should have been done, and on everything that wasn’t.

As the internet held forth, zoo staff who ordered Harambe killed were murderous captors who could have used a tranquilizer dart — a risky call with unpredictable results, real primate experts say.

And as for the toddler’s mother? She has been absolutely vilified as unfit by hordes of strangers who know nothing about her. A Change.org petition called for her investigation and arrest for allowing her son to stray in the first place. Cincinnati police say charges are unlikely, though.

As humans bickered, two female gorillas mourned back in the real, offline world. Chewie and Mara, the silverback’s mates, looked for but did not find Harambe, who had disappeared from their midst as unexpectedly as the child had dropped into it.

Their plaintive hunt is part of an important ritual and a sign of profound grief, says National Zoo scientist emeritus Benjamin B. Beck. He has studied great ape behavior and intelligence for more than 45 years, witnessed ape grieving and written about it in a fact-based novel, “Ape,” that explores the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human primates in a dense Rwandan forest.

“I am sure those two females are grieving” Beck said, adding that Chewie and Mara need and deserve emotional support as surely as human families do in similar circumstances.

Famed primatologist Jane Goodall worried about that, too.

“How did the others react?” she asked zoo director Thane Maynard in a condolence email. “Are they allowed to see, and express grief, which seems to be so important?”

Whether gorillas have a right to simply be gorillas and grieve as they would in their home ranges in equatorial Africa goes to the heart of a debate that has been heightened by Harambe’s death, a tragic but seminal moment in a movement that could change how zoos look in the future.

Taking the Side of the Gorilla

When the hyperbole and rancor are stripped away, Beck says he’s gratified by what the furor says about the public’s acceptance of great apes as not that much different from us.

“Revolution is too mild a word” to describe the shift in awareness and acceptance of great apes as sentient beings over the past half century, Beck told Patch.

At his first job at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo in 1970, it was common to see people “throwing peanuts at apes and monkeys, hurling them with force, and laughing at them” and no one thought much about it, he said. Back then, Harambe’s death might have been shrugged off by the public as unfortunate and sad, but largely inconsequential, or even cheered due to the era's incorrect stereotypes of gorillas as big, bad killer apes.

“The big take-home for me is that people are moved, incredibly moved, by the death of this gorilla,” Beck, now of Newark, MD, said. “It’s so heartening to see people come out on the side of the gorilla.

“I could do without some of the vitriol, but people are connecting to the fact that great apes, including gorillas, are extraordinarily like us in so many ways.”

From Beck’s perspective, the “side of the gorilla” is this:

The situation that unfolded over about 10 minutes around 4 p.m. on Saturday, May 28, was confusing, chaotic and novel for Harambe. He had never had a human in his enclosure before, let alone a crying child who seemed to have fallen from the sky. Zoo visitors were screaming. So were the silverback’s two female companions, Chewie and Mara, from deep inside the enclosure.

“I think he was totally confused and didn’t know the right response,” Beck said. “Let’s face it — if he wanted to kill the child, he would have done so in a millisecond.”

Beck doesn’t criticize the zoo’s use of deadly force, standard protocol across the Association of Zoos and Aquariums system when a human’s life is on the line.

But neither does he think Harambe would have harmed the boy.

“Social separation, intense over-stimulation and obviously high degrees of stress — and yet he still doesn’t hurt this kid,” Beck said. “He treated this little boy roughly by our standards, but I think dragging the boy through the water was a sign of agitation, not aggression.

“In looking at video, there’s never one sign of gorilla aggression. Quite the contrary, he stood over that little boy for long periods in a very protective stance.”

Binti-Jua, Jambo Protected Children, Too

Two similar instances where children fell into gorilla pits — at Durrell Wildlife Park in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1986, and again in 1996 at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo — were resolved without harm to the gorillas.

At the Jersey Zoo, the large silverback Jambo loomed over an unconscious 12-year-old boy who fell 20 feet, gently stroked his back and then stood — protectively, Beck said — between the boy and other gorillas in the enclosure.

In Chicago, a female gorilla, Binti-Jua, picked up the lifeless body of a 3-year-old boy who had fallen into a gorilla pit and cradled him in her arms before handing him over to zookeepers.

Beck said the parallels in the three instances are striking: “Kids fall in; the barrier is insufficient; the gorillas are enormously attracted to the situation, but not aggressively; and the kids get out safely.”

Still, he’s not ready to say the Cincinnati Zoo staff should have tried to wait out the gorilla, negotiate a “trade” — the strategy employed to convince Binti-Jua to give up the child at Brookfield Zoo — or deploy a tranquilizer or stun gun.

“Here’s my beef: You have experts on TV and social media saying with absolute certainty the gorilla would hurt the child, and others saying the exact opposite with absolute certainty.

“I would say there is no way anybody could have predicted what Harambe was going to do with absolute certainty,” Beck said. “I have had quite a bit of experience with gorillas. I didn’t see aggression, but I did see agitation, and I could not tell you what was going to happen.”

'He Was Like One of My Sons'

Jerry Stones, who cut Harambe’s umbilical cord 17 years ago at a Texas zoo and was his caretaker for 15 years, isn’t wading into the messy debate of zoo culpability, either.

Stones, now 74, is simply remembering the smart, fun-loving gorilla he helped raise — a “beautiful and true character” whose name is Swahili for “pull together.”

“He was like one of my sons,” Stones told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Like human children, Harambe could be a handful at times — mischievous, Stones said, but never aggressive.

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Once, when he was a little gorilla, Harambe took his extra long stick of browse — cut branches from trees that vegetarian gorillas enjoy as snacks — and climbed to the top of the gorilla enclosure and poked out the lights.

He enjoyed playing games with the caretakers, clapping his hands and falling backward so they would catch him, and other ape hijinks — so like a little boy, or is it that a little boy is so like a gorilla?

Species Survival Dating Service

Stones recognized leadership qualities in Harambe he thought made him an excellent candidate for breeding under the Gorilla Species Survival Plan, a kind of matchmaking service that manages breeding among gorillas in captivity in accredited U.S. zoos.

Silverbacks chosen for the SSP breeding program based on their genetics, age and personality are an elite few. But Stones was right about Harambe’s potential to lead a gorilla troop, and in 2014, he joined Chewie, Mara and eight other Western lowland gorillas at the Cincinnati Zoo’s Gorilla World exhibit.

The plan was for Chewie, Mara and Harambe to create a family when the silverback was a bit older, but neither female was pregnant when he died. His semen was immediately collected and frozen, but it’s unclear if his seed will be used to breed gorillas in the future.

“It will be a loss to the gene pool of lowland gorillas,” zoo director Thane Maynard said at a news conference.

‘Profound’ Human-Like Grief

The more immediate loss is felt perhaps most excruciatingly by Chewie and Mara.

Only a teeny bit of DNA, about 1.6 percent, separates gorillas and us. As we are and do, gorillas are self-aware and lead emotionally rich lives, according to a growing body of research that shows human-like grief is just one of a range of emotions common among human and non-human primates.

They laugh, as the famous Koko — who understands and communicates English through American Sign Language — did when she got together with her pal Robin Williams; they cry, as Koko did after being told of his death. And when one of their own dies, gorillas hurt.

In the wild, apes would likely visit, touch and smell the dead individual lying, in a manner of speaking, in state.

Whether Chewie and Mara were able to pay last respects to Harambe with all that was going on — the chaos at the zoo, the time-limited semen collection procedure — is unclear.

And that goes to the heart of the question in the long simmering debate: What was Harambe, so like us biologically, cognitively and culturally, doing in a zoo in the first place?

'Turn a Moment Into a Movement'

The debate hinges on the complicated question of personhood, and whether humans’ interest in being entertained trumps what many see as a captive ape’s birthright to live an uncaged, authentic life in the wild.

“Harambe lost all of his freedoms — the freedoms to make choices about how he was to live, what he would eat, when he would sleep and go to the bathroom, where he would roam, and if he were to become a father,” Marc Berkoff, a leading voice behind the great ape personhood movement, wrote in a blog on Scientific American.

“While some might say Harambe had a ‘good life’ in the zoo,” continued Berkoff, co-founder with Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, “it doesn’t come close to the life he would have had as a wild gorilla, with all its attendant risks. …”

As tragic as the death is, Harambe’s demise is a seminal moment in the animal rights movement, Berkoff argues.

“We must face the difficult questions that arise because animals are ‘in,’ ” he wrote, “and the questions are not going to disappear.”

Image credit: Harambe, courtesy of the Cincinnati Zoo