Here’s a moral dilemma for you.

Little boy falls into a gorilla’s pen a the zoo. Gorilla appears to help little boy get steady. Then picks him up, walks round with him for a bit, ok, drags him round a bit too, then looks puzzled. Though how ‘puzzlement’ is assessed on the face of a 400lb primate I don’t know.

You are the zoo-person/director. What is your course of action?

First you assess the situation, a risk assessment. Little boy, 60lbs of skin and bone; gorilla: 400lb of muscle and power. So the boy ain’t gonna fight his way out.

I would first want to make sure it was a proper gorilla and not just a man in a gorilla suit. If it was the latter I would immediately shoot to kill. Same if it was a man dressed as a woman. Or half of a pantomime horse.

But it wasn’t a man, it was indeed a fucking great, hulking gorilla.

So you first hack into your inner memory bank; David Attenborough section; animals… mammels… primates! Ok. And what do we know? The great man (almost a God, certainly way beyond mere ‘national treasure’) once did primates, probably in Africa, cos it was unlikely to be in Birmingham, and I remember a few interesting facts.

Chimps looks sweet and cuddly, pouring all that tea and grinning all the time. But they’re in fact nasty, vicious, brutal and are the only other member of the animal kingdom (no prizes for guessing the other) who commit pre-meditated murder. Not for food purposes. Whereas gorillas, whilst appearing about as cuddly as crocodiles, are in fact very loving, nurturing, kind and considerate animals. And very non-aggressive. Though you wouldn’t wanna steal his banana.

But heh, this is a little boy. Not really good to just, kind’a, see that he might probably be ok. Issa gorilla. Massive one.

What I would do, were the decision made by me, would be to shoot a tranquilliser dart into Harambe (he lives in a fucking zoo; course he’s got a fucking name!!) and knock him into barbiturate-land to remove little boy from clutches. Apparently this was considered but tranqs take a couple minutes to work. And they were worried about the wait. Even though they’d watched the scenario for over 10 minutes already.

This happened at Cincinnati zoo. In America. So the whole dilemma thing is really redundant. Cos over there they live by the motto: ‘shit happens; shoot to kill’. Sometimes: ‘anything happens; shoot to kill’. And that’s what they did.

I don’t protest at hunt meetings. I don’t set fire to animal research centres. I’ve never boycotted McDonalds on cruelty-to-animals grounds. Nor any other grounds. I like meat. Chicken. Veal (sharp intake of breath). Foix gras (clutch heart in horror). But I also like animals of the non-culinary variety too. Which is why I hate zoos generally and American zoos in particular.

Who runs that zoo? Donald Trump??

Happy sunday

A xxxx