A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Outrage over Cincinnati Gorilla Killing Demonstrates Culture’s Growing Disdain for Human Life May 31, 2016

To me, this is an absolute no-brainer.  A little child tragically falls 15 feet into a gorilla pen at the Cincinnati Zoo.  Miraculously, he was not severely injured in the fall.  A 400-500 pound male silverback gorilla – the most powerful, dangerous kind – immediately roughly handled the little boy for whatever reason, though I find it odd that many are immediately anthropomorphizing the gorilla’s actions by finding in this very rough handling (the kind of handling if done by a human parent in public could result in jail time) a “rescue.”

Zookeepers were faced with an awful dilemma – to kill the gorilla immediately and insure the safety of the boy, or to try some means to pacify the gorilla which would necessarily take much, much longer and expose the boy to far more risk.  People who work at zoos tend to be animal lovers and this was obviously a very painful choice for them, but they absolutely made the right one.  In a life and death situation like this, the correct recourse is to remove the threat by the best means available.  Animal life is far secondary to human life.  This was an obvious decision and the Cincinnati Zoo absolutely made the correct response.

But dear Lord are millions of people not freaked out about this!  I have seen so many spittle-flecked and tear-filled Youtube videos and tweets I have been floored. These people are absolutely outraged that a cute furry animal (that could rip them limb from limb) was killed!  Many of these folks have all but declared that they value the gorilla’s life more than the boy’s!  And thus 200 years of intentional dehumanization begin to reach their apotheosis.

And that’s not all.  So incensed are these folks, there is now a campaign to have the boy and especially his parents punished!  Obviously there was some kind of failure here, either of security design at the exhibit/habitat, or of parental supervision, or both.  But people are calling for CPS to hound this family based on nothing but a one-time accident, the provenance of which is still entirely unknown?  Is that reasonable?  Is that really concern for the child, or the desire for revenge?

Last year a North Texas dentist’s life was ruined after it was found he had shot some lion in Zimbabwe no one had ever heard of before some activists got a story whipped up about its death.  Western animal lovers absolutely lost their minds over an animal they’d never heard of 3 minutes prior. This led to a furor against big game hunting in much of Africa, which hunting provides the vast majority of resources required to help insure the survival of big game in the first place!  The end result has been that far more lions and other big game are now being poached by locals and the population will grow significantly less healthy.  All this is to say that animal lovers frequently let their emotions override their reason, resulting in worse outcomes for the animals they purport to love.

So let me ask the animal lovers a question.  How would they be reacting if there were now all kinds of online video showing that boy being brutally killed by the gorilla?  How do you think that would be playing, and how loud would the calls be to put that gorilla down (calls, that would surely be heeded)?  How much damage would that do to the reputations of zoos and ongoing efforts to ostensibly aid wild animals?   I’d ask how they would feel if their own child were in that desperate situation, but probably of those complaining loudest, very few if any have children. Lord help the kids of those who do.

I have a firm diktat by which I live my life: there is always a worse outcome than the one you think you are afflicted with.  I suggest a much worse outcome for the lovers of cute and furry animals would be widespread and graphic footage demonstrating just how violent, cruel, and remorseless a wild animal can be.  Shooting such a powerful with a tranquilizer that may take 10 minutes to work could have provoked a grisly murder and the end of a human life infinitely more precious than any animal’s.  But then, even though I have literally dozens of animals around my house, I’ve been told I have a rather cold and cavalier attitude toward them.  For me, all it required was one glance at my first child to know the chasm between human and animal life is infinite.

The main gist of this post, however, is my dear Lord with what dehumanization do so many people view their fellow man today!  Decades of thorough and intentional indoctrination in leftist materialist self-serving will-to-power dialectics have produced now two or three generations of solipsistic narcissists who are virtually incapable of assigning to others the same rights and privileges they would want assigned to themselves.    For the most part, these people fail to recognize the humanity in others outside the degree to which such assignment benefits themselves.  That is to say, friends, family, and rutting buddies who give good feelz might be kind of human, in a Bugs Bunny sort of way, but strangers are worse than animals.  Most sadly of all, most of these solipsists are incapable of recognizing the uniqueness of their own humanity, either.  That is why they are fine with seeing millions of babies aborted worldwide, every year.

All of which creates a perfect breeding ground for human horror on an unbelievable scale.  The world today is Weimar Germany times a thousand or more, because the degree of sick ideology has grown immeasurably, and it is now almost uniform throughout the world.

Not that I am trying to read too much into one boy falling into a pit.  There are far more obvious indicators of the sickness of society than this one little episode.