Cincinnati Zoo kills gorilla after 4-year-old climbs into his pen

If that's the alternative to promoting the idea that the parents should be shot (which you've already advocated here) or the kid should be shot, then that's the way I'd lean, particularly when there are details about the situation that have not been made public. It is, after all, part of the zoo's job to ensure no breaches in their enclosures.

 

OK dude, that was pretty much being facetious, guess it was not clear. Have to spell it out. Saying the parents should be shot, was saying they are f'n morons if they let the kid somehow get into the cage with the gorilla. Pretty much think either that or they just failed to watch the kid at that time. Pretty sure the Cincinnati Zoo has been open for several years, have they just been lucky to not have something like this happen?

 

This lucky kid lived after doing something stupid. On the south side of Chicago kids get killed every weekend with less handwringing.

 

Yes, you have to spell it out. Because here's the thing about being facetious: It gets repeated. And the more it's repeated, the more likely it is that some knucklehead will see it and then actually try to do it. So if you want to say the parents are morons, then just say they're morons.

If you're going to use a black/white standard on whether the parents were negligent, then you should submit to that same black and white standard in your armchair assessments of what happened and how it should be dealt with.

 

Fault is never indivisible

 

The "parents are fuckin' morons" crowd may be right, but I'm pretty sure a big chunk of them have no clue how easy it is to lose track of a 4-year-old.

 

Yes, I was recalling this when someone wondered if the parents are going to sue the zoo. A kid fell out of a suite at Staples Center because his parents weren't paying attention. The kid died.

Here is a story on this following a judge's ruling to throw out the lawsuit:

To his family hovering nearby, he seemed safe, with a tall Plexiglas window behind him to keep him from toppling over the edge.
His Vietnamese mother, Hoai Mi, was hunched over her camera just an arm’s length from him.
Witnesses tell police she snapped a photo of Lucas, then glanced down to check the image. In that split second, Lucas reportedly shifted to his right, to an area of the bar where the Plexiglas window was only ten inches high.
He tipped over it, and fell twenty-seven feet to the floor below.

 

I went Hamilton (verbose and exhaustive). You went Burr (succinct). Yours is better.

 

That was the story, and that is terrible. Can't imagine having to live with that. But it just seems, when something like that happens the knee-jerk reaction is to say, 'the place/business is to blame.' No one seems to have a problem with that. But if the knee-jerk reaction is to say, 'the parents are to blame,' that means you are a heartless, bad person.

 

End of the month ... word budget's running a might tight.

 

Kids are unpredictable, quick, and able to get into, over, or through places that you would never believe. You can childproof everything and still they beat your best efforts. It's easy to say what the parents should or should not have done, but kids do things like dart into the street and get hurt no matter how hard you try to keep them safe.

When my son was two, we had put some cookies in a cabinet over the refrigerator. He pulled out drawers (with childproof latches) and used them as a ladder to get up on the counter. On the scale of things that's not very remarkable. It was the part where he stood on the counter and pulled himself up on top the the refrigerator that astonished me. Flat slick side, slick top, nothing to grab... and when I came back into the kitchen he's sitting up there eating a cookie. I wasn't out of the room more than maybe a minute and a half.

Yes, the zoo should be constructed in such a way as to render this impossible... but that's much easier to say than to do.

 

So they should sue the zoo and win.