The easy thing is to theorize, the complicated thing is to put yourself in the shoes of others and it is evident that when the news comes out of the margins of the "normal" it is all more complicated. The drama is there, that a specimen of an endangered species, such as the silver-backed gorilla, had to be sacrificed for an accident at the Cincinnati Zoo is a terrible thing.
Immediately the mother has been designated (and harassed in the nets) as responsible for the death of the animal for the lack of supervision towards her son. Judging is easy, but is it fair to hold the mother responsible for the unpredictable behavior of a four-year-old child?Let's stop blaming the child's mother for the death of the Harambe gorilla.
A visit to the zoo that seemed perfect
Saturday, a perfect day to go to the nearest zoo with the children.
Caps, sun creams, a bottle of water, loose money in case you have to buy something in a vending machine, baby diapers, some clean clothes for each of the four children.
Leaving home with everything planned when you take three children and a baby to the zoo is not a simple task but the plan can be a lot of fun.
Everything happens with the normality to which children have accustomed us until you reach the area of the gorillas. "Mom, I want to go with the gorillas," says one of the children, who is around 3-4 years old. And neither short nor lazy there goes, literally, something you couldn't even imagine.
Before you can react, considering that your reaction will be conditioned by the other three children and the baby who claim their attention share each and that although you are with a thousand eyes sometimes the reactions of the children surprise us more than we could imagine; The almost four-year-old boy climbs the fence just over a meter high, crosses the area of bushes a meter and a half wide and falls into the gorilla pit.
It falls. A fall of more than four meters. The world has just stopped. Despite the height, the little one seems to be fine, but a huge specimen of a 190-kilogram silver-backed gorilla approaches him. People are watching the spooky scene, the mother cannot even think what is happening, a woman is heard screaming "Mommy loves you", is the mother of the child who does not know what happened or how it happened what does not know what he can do now and it only occurs to him to remind his son that this is a reality: Mommy loves you son.
Time stops
Ten minutes of the clock are those that take time to decide the authorities of the zoo that the only solution to ensure that the life of the child who has fallen is saved is to kill the gorilla.
Ten minutes are too few to make such a decision but those same ten minutes for a mother last the same as if time had stopped, they become eternal, they never end.
Although Harambe does not have an aggressive attitude with the child, he catches him with a force far superior to that of a human, he shakes him without bad intention and at some point leaves his head in the water.
Ten minutes after which the child is transferred to a hospital with a severe prognosis. Ten minutes in which the feeling that you are going to lose it and the feeling of guilt have made you a lump in your throat that has almost never let you breathe.
Screams from the public, shots of those responsible for the zoo and all this in ten minutes between tears of his brothers and his parents who do not know how suddenly the life of his son is in the hands of a gorilla.
And when everything has happened, when the child has even been discharged from the hospital, when what remains is to chew that nightmare that has been to go to the zoo on Saturday with the children and try to forget it, It turns out that people who were not there believe that you, their mother, have a large share of guilt.
To the point that more than 450,000 people are signing a petition demanding justice for the Harambe gorilla and that you as a mother also be held responsible for his death.
As the child's own mother commented on her facebook page when her son was already home, for some reason
"... as a society, we are very quick in judging how a father can take his eyes off his son. Those who know me know that I watch my children closely. But accidents happen."
The easy thing is always to judge, the difficult thing is to put yourself in the shoes of others and each one, to assume their share of guilt.
In Magnet | The death of the Harambe gorilla: do we have the right to kill an animal to save a human life?
