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Seven escaped chimpanzees
- djmips 3y agoDecember 2022
- davidhyde 3y agoI wonder if they ever considered evacuating the village of 800. Seems like default human behaviour is to subjugate rather than run and think.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoI hope they're captured before they decide to run for Parliament.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't do this here.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoHorrible situation with the escaped chimpanzees, but in this tough situation, I think the zoo made the right call. Human safety comes first.
- cduzz 3y ago100% agree -- a horrible situation from start to finish. You really don't want to be in the same room as a chimpanzee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Davis_chimpanzee_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Davis_chimpanzee_att...
- rob74 3y agoThe article mentions another case: > 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...
- jtbayly 3y ago"The chimpanzees destroyed a majority of St. James's fingers, his left foot, most of his buttocks, both testicles, part of his torso, and parts of his face including his nose and his lips." Two male chimps.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NewJazz 3y ago[flagged]
- bedobi 3y agoDisagree. I know nothing about Zoos, animal keeping or what have you but... chimps gotta eat, couldn't they just have approached them with treats laced with sedative? + 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.
- tptacek 3y agoThe article discusses this option.
- NewJazz 3y agoFlagging my comments doesn't make your life more valuable than that of a chimp.
- zlg_codes 3y agoI've paid attention to how flagging happens on here, and it's strikingly similar to how reports are used on reddit and other sites. 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.
- wolverine876 3y ago> Human safety comes first. 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?
- RationalDino 3y agoThe fact that the head of another Swedish wildpark got convicted of manslaughter over the death of a keeper. Given that, it would be hard for those in charge to allow any worker to take risks to save these escaped animals. Even if the worker was willing to do so. That answers how much risk we're willing to tolerate.
- wolverine876 3y agoThat answers how much risk a certain institution is willing to tolerate. Institutional tolerances differ from individuals IME; many institutions are risk-averse because people seek to protect their jobs, especially if it has a culture of blame. 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?
- justrealist 3y agoWhat would you do about escaped dogs?
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- figmert 3y ago[flagged]
- civilitty 3y agoThat movie series is so incredibly unrealistic. If humanity kills itself, we're definitely taking the rest of the apes with us.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoWhich part? The same plague that gave the chimps intelligence also killed humans. Wasn't it an experimental Alzheimer's drug? It helped chimps, hurt humans. I thought it was pretty realistic, given that premise.
- pvaldes 3y agoThe question here IMAO is if they escaped by their own means or received external help. 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.
- nabla9 3y ago4 dead, 1 wounded, 2 uninjured chimps.
- niccl 3y agoI'm curious about what failure of budget or imagination meant there was no alarm to indicate that the outer door was open at the same time as the door between enclosures? 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?
- wolverine876 3y agoLack of hindsight. IME, in every situation there are a million such issues and you can't invest resources, including limited staff time, in fixing them all.
- NewJazz 3y agoI think the simple answer is that zoos are held together by duct tape and optimized for human entertainment, not animal welfare or even the safety of visitors.
- skilled 3y agoI actually don’t think they made the right call and whomever wrote this article, began it by planting a seed in the readers mind that these chimps are killers and will maul people on first contact. 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”.
- chasil 3y agoThe problem is that a single unlocked door led to the unavoidable termination of these animals. 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.
- suzzer99 3y agoThis is what bothers me the most. Design the system so it doesn't rely on keepers remembering to lock doors. For one shift door to open, everything else must be locked down.
- vanattab 3y agoI would think that may violate fire codes no?
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
- philip1209 3y ago[flagged]
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoThis seems irrelevant
- philip1209 3y agoI intended to highlight a consistent culture of hyper rationalism, such as shooting escaped animals and not allowing zookeepers in the cages.
- dist-epoch 3y agoChimps are considered by many more dangerous (to humans) than tigers or lions. Because they are smart. With some luck you can trick a tiger. Much harder with a chimp.
- mynameishere 3y agoIf a tiger attacks you, it will go for the neck and you will die. Chimps attack humans just like they attack other chimps, and that means going for the face, hands, and genitals. I'm not even sure there are any humans who've been killed by them. They just horribly torture people and let them live. It's hard to ascribe evil to an animal, but chimps are clearly working on it, heading up the evolutionary ladder.
- zlg_codes 3y agoWe're genetically related, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that our closest cousins are also mean as hell. We didn't become the apex predator of this planet for no reason.
- rob74 3y agoAlso, everyone knows that a tiger is dangerous, but you can be lured into a false sense of safety with a chimp...
- rdtsc 3y agoThat's terrible what happened. It was hard to read about the 3 year old Torsten getting shot... > 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.
- jjk166 3y agoI mean if you imagine a scenario like leaving a vehicle running such that a human child could drive it around out of control, and to protect people from the vehicle you killed the kid, we'd undoubtedly be complaining about both letting an innocent being in your care get into the situation where they posed a threat to others, as well as dealing with that threat by killing the innocent being. The sin is not killing the chimpanzees, the sin is creating a situation where they had to kill the chimpanzees.
- rdtsc 3y agoI don't quite want to entertain the parallel, it's a bit too gruesome... In a way it would imply there is a paper form one has to fill to call the "hunters" and allow them to shoot. So then the state would raise an objection about not filling the paperwork, while also objecting that the human lives were put in danger. But then if they sat down and started to fill out forms and mail them in to get permission, they would have gotten in more trouble over putting lives in danger for even longer. So it's a Kafkaesque kind of a situation.
- 3y ago
- cobertos 3y agoI wish they would have followed up more in the ending section with how the CEO (Wilke) felt about it in totality, specifically their decision to shoot. Their reflections on the events say a lot about if/how the park has learned from it
- RationalDino 3y agoThe former keeper left the zoo over frustration that the zoo prioritized rollercoasters over the animals. That speaks louder about the CEO's thinking than anything that the CEO might say about it.
- verisimi 3y agoOpening paragraph: > 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?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]