From Pajamas Media:
To gauge the extent of the demise of Europe, look no further than the story of the male gorilla that escaped at a Rotterdam zoo last month. After managing to get over a moat, the 400-pound primate brutally attacked a woman who had been visiting the zoo regularly to see the animal. Because female gorillas establish prolonged eye contact when they want to mate, biologists concluded that the woman was responsible for the attack. Taking moral relativism to its illogical conclusion, the Antwerp Zoo in Belgium now has signs warning visitors not to stare at the apes.
Which, I suppose, is only fair. After all, whose fault is it when you catch the clap off some curbside hooker?
Certainly not hers. After all, she’s just the attraction. Whereas you are the one who has objectified her with your (one-eyed) Gaze.
You reap what you sow, gorilla teases / dirty, misogynistic johns.
So don’t look to me or Amanda for sympathy. PIGS!
Oh now you’re just being silly. A gorilla may be a higher primate but it is still a wild animal; a gorilla locked in a zoo is not like a puppy in your friend’s house.
Don’t pet the tigers, don’t bathe in the killer whale pool and don’t stare down the gorillas. Duh!
(Cue the bleating about “trolling”, leaving poo on the rug etc etc.)
Why was this woman stalking the gorilla? That’s what I wanna know.
Yes, David. How dare one go to the zoo and LOOK AT THE ANIMALS!
We should be OUTRAGED on behalf of the gorilla. I know I am.
(cue refusal to bleat about “trolling,” poo poo on the rug, etc etc.)
One of the standout memories I have of the great apes occurred during a visit to the Wild Animal Park in San Diego. One of the humans held up her baby in outstretched hands towards the enclosure so it could see better, and a mother ape held up her baby in the same manner, faced towards the human mother.
cranky, not all apes are the same tho.
Dispatching an adult male gorilla requires some serious firepower – in the vicinity of .44 Mag I suppose.
Please, please, please tell me that David Ross was trying to be funny, or impersonating some PETA activist.
The story about holding the babies up is great.
I don’t really understand this post. Are you saying the gorilla should have been indicted for rape? Or perhaps subjected to summary punishment? I also don’t really see how this relates to western “relativism”, unless the summary execution of a captive primate is supposed to indicate a return to morality.
Yeah, I know. The apes in question from my story were “the big ones.” In any case, whenever I hear about apes, I think about how human that moment was.
You know what else they left out? She was wearing a short skirt. She was asking for it.
Was it a white male ape? If so, it’s all his fault.
If it was an undocumented immigrant ape, I’m sure the woman was at fault.
If the uncovered meat placed herself in front of the ape of the religion….
[my emphasis]
So do female humans….so can we use that as an excuse to beat the crap out of Rosie O’Donnell? Or do we need to get a 400 pound gorilla to do it?
Holy fuck ! Lord help us all if these asshats truly do not understand this. I hope that they are being so sarcastic that I just missed it, but I suspect not. It is a fucking ZOO ! People go to zoos to stare at animals. Blaming this woman for looking at a gorilla is the functional equivalent of blaming a rape victim for having a nice ass, or a great rack. Should you be so dense as to not understand this simple concept, please surrender your drivers license immediately, do not dare reproduce, and remove all sharp, semi-sharp, and pointed objects from your home forthwith.
Could you get a 400 pound gorilla to do it?
And while you are at it, go stare at a gorilla.
What do you get when you cross a 400 pound gorilla and Rosie?
Nothing!
There are some things even a gorilla will not do!
Stupid gorilla. If it didn’t want to be stared at, what the fuck was it doing in a zoo?
I think Moops almost has it.
Isn’t Rosie the result of crossing something with a 400 lb gorilla?
Yes, I wrote that. I’m a mean person.
It’s a damn shame the distraught zookeepers didn’t consult Marianne Means. Because you know how to stop a 400 lb. gorilla?
Indeed. It was almost Homer(Simpson)ic.
JD: I really don’t get it. If there are animals that are made violent by being stared at, don’t do it. Also, don’t pet the polar bears ….
The gorilla isn’t going to “learn” anything. If staring at gorillas (that means, looking at them in the eye) is going to make them violent, then the only actor who can adapt is the human, because the gorilla sure won’t. Of course, you could kill any gorilla who stares back at humans, but, after all, you go to the zoo to see live gorillas, not dead ones, n’est-ce pas?
I didn’t realize that staring down a gorilla is going to be taken as an invitation for a sexual or physical assault, but, if that’s the case, I’m not going to go out of my way to provoke a caged animal.
First I believe you would have to get a viagra prescription for the gorilla.
or
How much beer would it take to give a 400 lb gorilla “beer goggles”.
Not looking, staring
There is a difference.
Specesist.
That’s one alternative. Another is, when you build the gorilla exhibit, build it in such a way that the damn gorillas can’t escape. And if you fail in doing that, don’t blame the unfortunate people who happened to get mauled as a result of your failure. No one’s saying that the gorilla is at fault here (or that a concept like “fault” can be applied to a gorilla), but to suggest that it was the woman’s fault for looking at an animal in a zoo exhibit<i> seems pretty absurd.
Maybe instead of a warning to visitors not to look at the animals, a warning should be placed at the entrance to the zoo saying “Be advised: Containment of animals not guaranteed!” Along those lines, I’d like to think that the description in the article was incomplete, and that there was something more substantial than a moat separating silverbacks from people.
Steve – you are joking, right ?
Now that I think about it, this woman should be charged with solicitation, or cruelty to animals. How could one possibly think that they could look, or heaven for-fucking-bid stare, at a gorilla at a zoo.
When I took my daughter to the zoo 2 weeks ago, I fully instructed her to not stare at a rhinoceros, elephants, and most certainly not gorillas, as they were prone to attempts at sexual assault if you looked at them for longer than 4 seconds. Everybody knows that if you stare at a caged wild animal for more than 4 seconds, no cage can hold them, and you are just begging to get ass raped.
After seeing the pictures, clearly it was the lady’s fault. She was a 5’11” leggy busty blonde Swedish bikini model, dressed in a tiny Catholic schoolgirl outfit, complete with white thigh highs, and pigtails. The gorilla never had a chance.
Steve – I really hope you were joking.
The sign at the Antwerp Zoo…
Apparently had little to do with the moral corruption of innocent gorillas by eagle-eyed trollops. Maybe a wee bit o’er the top on this one, gents.
Yeah, but that’s what we do. Well, some of us, anyway.
RUN WITH IT!!
Yep, should’ve checked the link. Aaron Hanscom seems to have taken a fair amount of artistic license with that one.
I, for one, welcome our new gorilla overlords.
–Dr. Zira
If the zoo cannot ensure the safety of their patrons from the horny gorillas, then the gorillas should be removed from the zoo, or their security enhanced. Blaming a patron for “staring” at an animal, which is precisely what they apy to do when they go to a zoo, strikes me as ridiculous.
Frankly, one should be able to wear an ape suit, flash tit, and jump around with a bunch of bananas, and not have to worry about being sodomized by a Silverback, unless that is what your goal was.
If you think its bad in Rotterdam, you should see what’s in the windows outside of the “Old Church” in Amsterdam…
You seriously want to avoid prolonged eye contact there, could be very costly indeed. Don’t ask me how I know….
I don’t know. Gorillas can also take direct eye contact as a sign of aggression, so maybe he was reacting to the woman as an enemy. Supposing, of course, that the gorilla didn’t recognize the woman as a female, which is not at all certain.
Furthermore, there are some people these days who think they can create meaningful relationships with the more intelligent animals, like that fool in Alaska who decided to get all chummy with bears, thinking he was being accepted by them as an equal, when surprise, surprise, they up and tore him to shreds.
Maybe this chick thought she could go Dian Fossey one better and through her repeat visits establish a quasi-romantic or at least “interpersonal” relationship with the ape by staring into his fathomless soul.
And whereas I wouldn’t say the incident was her fault, if she were stalking the thing, she could have at least studied up on proper ape etiquette.
Ding! We have a winner!
As crazy and stupid as he was, he was generally accepted by the bears as one of their own. Or at a minimum, at least something other than an interloper.
Unfortunately one of the risk of being a rather weak and scrawny bear is that larger dominant, or rogue, bears will occaisionally kill and sometimes even eat you. Browns do it to black bears all the time.
So foreplay is equivalent to violence. Gosh, maybe Catherine McKinnon was right.
McKinnon – Any sex between male gorillas and human women is rape.
Singer – Sex between gorillas and humans is a natural occurrence.
Bob Knight – If it is inevitable, lay back and enjoy it.
Moops. The zookeepers are certainly free to dissolve all zoos as immoral and go home. But blaming the woman here?
As I read this, B-Moe, that was the sign posted as a result of the attack. And I agree with those who say if a gorilla has a propensity to attack those who stare at it, it should be kept in the kind of enclosure from which it can’t escape.
Or else it shouldn’t be exhibited.
Where I live, we have silverback bars, silverback showers, a silverback pride day with a parade. It’s really cool unless there’s eye contact. Oooooo.
JD: Is that Peter Singer?
A precognitive version of Rosie’s poem about the incident:
im sad
only het sex @ the zoo
no grrilla lovin 4 me
Geezer – exactly. What are these silverbacks you speak of ?
What do you get when you cross a 400 pound gorilla and Rosie?
First I believe you would have to get a viagra prescription for the gorilla.
Secondly. The gorilla requires a blindfold.
Thirdly. The gorilla rquire that Rosies arms be bound and she be muzzled so that she cant hurt him during the act of lovemaking.
Finally, the gorilla requests that should any issue result of this union, that the child should be raised catholic.
I think that the gorilla would require Viagra, and Rohypnol.
Jake Thackeray sang an excellent song on this subject, about a gorilla who escaped from his cage and ran amok.
One quatrain that sticks in my mind is:
“Now the gorilla is very proficient
In the role of a paramour.
His mental equipment’s deficient
And his eyesight’s awfully poor”
It gets worse as it goes on, ending up with a granny being spurned and a judge being ravished.
It didn’t say whether he was an Administrative judge.
I think it would help if the facts of this case were established a bit better.
What aroused my ire was the idea that “fault” in a moral sense can be attached to any animal.
I also think it’s a non-starter to talk about “fault” in a pejorative sense in this case. Something happened: why did it happen? That’s the key. Assigning blame MAY make sense when describing human interactions, but not human-animal interactions. A failure to assign blame or guilt under any conditions is not necessarily a reflection of “moral relativism”, and it most certainly is not such a reflection when applied to a being which by definition is incapable of moral reflection (otherwise, we would be committing a crime by keeping it in a cage.)
That too was an element that struck me as absurd.
The reconstruction of the incident indicates that they were attempting to find out what caused the gorilla to attack. There could have been, of course, several reasons. The gorilla was sick. The gorilla was in heat. The gorilla was abused by a previous owner and was violent. If the gorilla was “responsible” (NOT “at fault”) under one of these conditions, then the gorilla would need to be treated or put down.
On the other hand, in assigning “responsibility” (and NOT fault and NOT guilt) to the woman, they were apparently simply trying to establish that it was something she did that caused the gorilla to attack. This doesn’t mean she should be punished, it doesn’t mean her medical bills shouldn’t be paid, or that the zoo shouldn’t make a nice settlement with her. It simply means that it is dangerous to stare (NOT look) at gorillas (and NOT necessarily any other animal).
To suggest the Gorilla was at fault or to go on and on about various rape analogies misses another point. Human beings are not gorillas. Gorillas are not human beings. The reason provocation is not a defense for _human beings_ is precisely the same reason why provocation _is_ a defense for a gorilla: because we have the ability to control impulses and not act on them, sometimes under the threat of punishment (prison) and sometimes for other reasons.
Look, I’m sorry about what happened to this lady. Would it do anything to prevent it happening again to blame it on the gorilla and execute him? (Perhaps they did, I don’t know.) It certainly would have no deterrent effect among gorillas at large. On the other hand, if they have established that prolonged eye contact (i.e., staring) is likely to provoke a gorilla, don’t do it. It’s pretty simple.
And, yes, they should build a better enclosure for their gorillas. From a legal point of view, the zoo remains liable (NOT the same as responsible, guilty, or blameworthy.)
If an animal can be provoked into an assault as a result of a human staring at it, then it should not be in a fucking zoo. The entire concept of a zoo is for children and adults to come stare at animals in a safe environment, that they could not likely encounter, safely, in real life.
In short, if this freaking animal can be provoked to assault by a person staring, then putting it in a place where people pay to come stare at them does not seem like a very bright idea.
What’s this is nothing new, Europe has been blaming the Joos for the Nazis for years. Personally I’m surprised someone on the left hasn’t insisted it was Bush’s fault.
Yeah, that was Peter Singer.
Look up and read his “Heavy Petting”. It’s the first philosophical paper in which I’ve seen the f-bomb casually dropped.
Steve: I think the disagreement is with how the article’s phrased, really. Neither party can be held at “fault,” so saying someone was just seems like “oh let’s hate the harmanz here”.
…Humans. Sorry, been playing a lot of Urban Dead.
According to scientific research, each execution in a death penalty case results on average in five fewer murders because of deterrence. It should be possible for the state of Texas to increase the number of executions until people who were previously murdered begin to spontaneously rise from the dead. That is the single best rational argument against a right to cannibalism.
Oops, wrong thread. Sorry. I meant to say no blood for gorillas.
Steve, I think you’re misapprehending the point here a bit. The point is not about failure to assign blame properly (to the gorilla or elsewhere), it’s about choosing to blame the victim, in this case, the victim of an accident. Now, given how completely Hanscom seemed to mischaracterize the “don’t stare” sign, I’m much more skeptical about the rest of the characterization in his story (for example, the anonymous biologists may not have been concluding that the woman was “responsible”, but merely have been speculating on why the gorilla went after her in particular). But if anyone was suggesting that the woman was in any way at fault for being attacked by a free-roaming gorilla, that is completely ridiculous, and that’s the point. And if the zookeepers, whose job it is to keep the animals contained, were the ones doing the blaming, that makes it that much more outlandish.
Western women are uncovered meat! Walking b’loney samwichs with tits! Skirt steak with legs!
When a gorilla gets the munchies what’s a gorilla supposed to do, pass on the all-u-can immodest meat buffet?
I am suprised that there has not been a reference to “Gorilla You’re a Desperado” by Warren Zevon. Quite appropriate to the subject at hand.
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