> Two separate legal investigations into the park over their conduct are ongoing, one for the alleged crime of neglecting human safety in allowing the chimpanzees to escape, and another for violation of Sweden’s Animal Welfare Act in killing the four apes.
That's a bit of a catch-22 situation. Had they instead gone to file the animal welfare act euthanasia paperwork, they could be even more liable for neglecting human safety. If they called the hunters, and killed the animals, presumably so they don't harm humans, now they are breaking the animal safety law.
> “The animal keeper that forgot that door has had a very, very tough time,” Wilke told me. The public reaction has also not been kind. “When we read people say that we’re the ones who should be shot, that we’re monsters and savages, it’s horrible,” said Beldt.
I guess we are just as fickle and go from playful to violent, just like the chimpanzees they are describing in the article. Random strangers are quite happy to have the zoo keepers shot over this.
Doesn't take much time in this world to derive that fact. Humans are not the logical, order-following, intellectual beast some of them see themselves as. We are, at best, clever monkeys who are good at detecting patterns and making up bullshit for the tribe to swallow.
The sin is not killing the chimpanzees, the sin is creating a situation where they had to kill the chimpanzees.
Of course that will make you think that they did the right thing, but is it actually true that no person interacts with these animals directly across the world?
It sounded to me like sheer ignorance and complete lack of experience of the people who worked there. I don’t blame them seeing as how they are located in the middle of nowhere, and having the right people at hand might not be optimal, other than one of the other women who actually had connection with the smart chimp.
But that woman was denied entry. And yet she was probably the only person who could have accurately judged the situation for what it was as opposed to “what it could have been”.
There were no attempts to lure them back to the enclosure (to which they would likely have returned due to the low temperature), no other attempts at capture, and no other plan than termination.
When escape of the enclosure is a lethal threat, then the enclosure needs greater protections to prevent mandatory termination. There should be at least three levels of containment, using doors with mechanisms that the animals cannot manipulate.
Facilities that cannot meet these containment standards should be forced to surrender them to those who can.
The problem is that this "can't" happen.
Zoo animals in harsh climates always sleep indoors in a big inner room heated. This main room can be accessed by a minimum of 2 doors. One (or several) leads to the external part of the exhibition. This play area will typically have a moat, that gradually gets deeper, and a high wall. Chimps are poor swimmers (they sink like a rock on water) and the wall is designed to avoid escapes. If the animals escape to this enclosure they can't proceed further and are not a danger for the public so shooting them wouldn't have any sense.
The other door leads typically to a small logistics area, used to store needed stuff (brooms, fresh hay etc) or to interact with the animals safely. This small hall is accessed trough a second locked door. Sometimes you can't open the room door without locking first the pre-cage door. The design encourages having at least one locked door at any time.
The building itself will typically have a main door, the third, to allow access from the outside
One unlocked door means that the chimps will be contained in the broom's hall. Even with two unlocked doors this could end with the chimps trapped inside as long as you have solid windows (as expected in Sweden).
In this case both locks were left opened at the same time,
two or maybe three doors unlocked by night, in the middle of a harsh weather (any opened door would lead to a noticeable chill air current inside the building, or even maybe to the electronic heater system triggering automatically an alarm)
They likely would have returned to their enclosures because of the cold.
"Many other experts have pointed out that since
chimpanzees do not like the cold, they would have been
likely to return to the ape house."
'Beldt told me he had relived those days perhaps 1,000
times, wondering if they could have done anything
different. Every time, he comes to the same conclusion:
no. Chimpanzees can turn, and the line between play and
violence is thin. Beldt remembers a time when he sat
talking to Linda through the bars of the enclosure, and
Manda snuck up and jabbed him with a stick she had
sharpened with her teeth, just centimetres from his left
eye.
'“People without any experience of chimpanzees say: if I
had done it, I would have got some bananas, and they would
have gone back,” Beldt said. “And maybe, but maybe not.
Maybe you would have ended up in a body bag, or in 1,000
body bags, because chimps like to tear things from limb to
limb.”'The former keeper should have been given a chance to try. Sign a waiver, the keeper knows the risks.
If the chimps leave the zoo, then shoot them. But not when they are in the ape enclosure. And for Pete's sake. Don't put people who want to run rollercoasters in charge of animal welfare.
The fact that outside primatologists say that she was the likely best option supports the fact that she should have been given the chance. Before shooting.
'(A spokesperson for Furuvik Zoo told me that that they didn’t take Persson up on her offer because they believed that “those currently working with us are the ones who know the chimpanzees best.”)'
I don't think she would have been permitted on the grounds for ideological problems, in addition to legal liabilities.
...and I'm upvoting your comments, as the ratings above aren't fair.
The problem is with humans we have a better idea of the circumstances in which that sort of thing might happen, but with chips we have very limited insight into that sort of behaviour and can't ask them about it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chimp-was-drugged-with-xanax
"It's been well known in primate circles that giving valium to monkeys and apes, particularly if their adrenaline is up, can have a very different effect and not be sedating,"
"Humans who are aggressive or unstable can get worse under the influence of Xanax, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
"They just have more frequent and severe outbursts," Coccaro said.
It had basically been living like a human being since they took him from his mother at 3 days old in between acting stints and when he got stressed as with many actors he took drugs. I wonder why that didn't go well.
Where were the tranquilizer shots ?
i don't know why the people who were trained to raise these animals, lived with them, LOVED them for years, and came to the excruciating decision to terminate them are being treated as amateurs. from my reading of this article, the decision, although difficult, would have been made exactly the same way today. the paramount concern in zoos is always human life. they knew these animals best, and they knew what they were capable of.
i don't envy the keepers there that day, this will unfortunately be a cloud over their whole career/life.
Surely it would be a simple and relatively cheap (low hundreds of dollars) to set that up. They had obviously already had done significant risk planning, so how come nothing for prevention apart from Standard Operating Procedures? the new funfair management team vetoing the budget? Zookeepers not thinking that way?
Because they are smart. With some luck you can trick a tiger. Much harder with a chimp.
It's hard to ascribe evil to an animal, but chimps are clearly working on it, heading up the evolutionary ladder.
You really don't want to be in the same room as a chimpanzee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Davis_chimpanzee_att...
Two male chimps.
> In one particularly horrifying incident in 2009, a chimpanzee called Travis who had been raised by humans from birth mauled his owner’s friend, biting and tearing her face, ripping out her eyes, removing one of her hands and most of the other.
Horrifying indeed...
Let's look deeper at the real question they faced: How much risk (of life and limb) is it worth to save a chimpanzee's life?
Obviously the answers aren't 0 or 100%. If it was 0%, then we wouldn't have zoos, zookeepers, pets of many species, farms, etc. 100% means it's worth trading certain death for a human to save a chimpanzee - arguable philosophically, but for the sake of this discussion, I'll rule it out.
The answer is in-between. Everyone takes risks around dogs, horses, cattle - small children play with most of them. Zookeepers take much greater risks, it seems, around wild animals. So do hunters, tourists, etc.
How much risk do we tolerate? Do zookeepers take 1/1000 risk of death over their careers?
That answers how much risk we're willing to tolerate.
Would you risk your life to save a chimpanzee? I would to some extent. A peaceful, friendly chimp; and with instruction from an expert; I might take the risk. An angry chimp would be unlikely to receive aid that involves risk. Forget violence; what about wading into a flood to rescue an unconscious chimp?
I guess it's not a big surprise considering reddit was basically a fork of HN, but it's something I've noticed. The features of websites get abused to facilitate antisocial behavior.
+ in general, in case of situations like this, Zoos should be required to employ people with enough fortitude and good enough relationship with the animals to approach them to dish out said treats, or throw a net on them or whatever, maybe wearing riot gear and other protective equipment or what have you but yeah there should be a requirement that someone takes some degree of risk before jumping straight to shooting the animals, especially if they haven't even yet displayed any aggression or anything. It seems to me Zoos jump straight to shooting them because it's the safest (for them), quickest and cheapest way of ending the situation, which isn't good enough.
Actually, Zoos should be banned period lol but yeah.
> The problems began when Linda was about 18 months old. For a year, she had lived in harmony with a Swedish couple and their three young children in Liberia. Hers had not been an easy start in life. As a baby, in 1984, she saw her family shot by poachers in the Liberian jungle.
Perhaps they should call in chimpanzee psychotherapists to help them over ptsd, no?
Seriously, why anthropomorphise in this way? Are chimpanzees people?
Similar history happened in other zoos subject to animalist harassment (with "free the chimps" campaigns for months if I remember correctly). Finally the chimps escaped somehow in 2015. One was shooted and the other died drowned not much later. Maybe somebody naively expected a different outcome or even still regret to participate in that campaigns. We'll never know.
Chimps are known to be furry Houdinis in any case, but yes, they can be very dangerous.