A dry gunshot. Silence. And a question that still has no fair answer. 🦍 Harambe, a 200-kilo western lowland gorilla, was shot dead on May 28, 2016 at the Cincinnati Zoo after a three-year-old boy fell more than four meters into his enclosure pit.
The child had climbed over a fence less than a meter high on his own while his mother wasn’t looking. Cameras from dozens of cell phones recorded everything: Harambe lifted the little boy out of the water, moved him around in confusion because of the chaos… but he never showed signs of aggression. Even so, the zoo did not hesitate: the order to kill him was immediate.
What few people know is that Harambe’s life was a chain of human tragedies from the very beginning. When he was two years old, his mother and siblings died of asphyxiation at a Texas zoo because of chlorine tablets negligently placed near a heater. 😡 He never knew the jungle.