[HN Gopher] Seven escaped chimpanzees
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Seven escaped chimpanzees
Author : zabzonk
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-12-05 07:26 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I hope they're captured before they decide to run for Parliament.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Horrible situation with the escaped chimpanzees, but in this
| tough situation, I think the zoo made the right call. Human
| safety comes first.
| cduzz wrote:
| 100% 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_att...
| rob74 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| "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.
| bedobi wrote:
| Disagree. 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 wrote:
| The article discusses this option.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Flagging my comments doesn't make your life more valuable than
| that of a chimp.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| justrealist wrote:
| What would you do about escaped dogs?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| let emojis = '\uD83D\uDC35\uD83D\uDC12\uD83D\uDE48\uD83D\uDE49\uD
| 83D\uDE4A\uD83E\uDD8D\uD83E\uDDA7';
| pvaldes wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| 4 dead, 1 wounded, 2 uninjured chimps.
| niccl wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Lack 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| Part of the calculus behind shooting them appears to have
| been the likelihood that they would have suffered a worse
| death from the cold if they didn't return to the building,
| and with the light failing, the opportunity to spare them
| that death was passing.
| chasil wrote:
| I don't think that was a factor at all.
|
| 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."
|
| The risk to human life was the paramount concern.
| '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."'
| scythe wrote:
| Most animals are more dangerous when they are in what
| they perceive as "their territory" versus the field. A
| dog that is very timid on walks might jump on visitors to
| their house; bees that fiercely defend their hives will
| rarely sting when foraging; maybe you can think of other
| examples.
| RationalDino wrote:
| I read that as, "Person who made bad decisions concludes
| that there was no alternative but the bad decisions
| made."
|
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Chimps aren't so stupid that they would freeze to death a
| few minutes away from a warm place they know.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| This 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| The latest series of Planet Earth III shows chimpanzees
| crossing roads and farms to reach their foraging areas, the
| farms have just popped up and encroached on the land they
| normally just roamed. Nobody tries to approach them and the
| chimpanzees don't do anything aggressive in the stuff that was
| aired. The elephants were much more dangerous at least in the
| segment they showed from Kenya where they kept stats on number
| of elephants and humans killed per year.
| swalling wrote:
| That series is really good, but chimps can be incredibly
| dangerous when in close proximity to humans. In rural Africa,
| there have been numerous reports of conflicts with wild
| chimps, including them abducting and killing children.
| https://archive.ph/2b4MJ
| standardUser wrote:
| The famous story of a woman having her face literally torn off
| by an otherwise friendly and trained chimpanzee has caused a
| lot of fear around chimps that didn't exist before. I have no
| idea how common it is for a chimpanzee to decide to maul a
| person, but it absolutely does happen. I would rather they kill
| the chimp than allow even a small risk of it maiming or
| murdering a person.
| tcbawo wrote:
| I would love to know how quickly and unexpectedly a
| chimpanzee would turn on a familiar human. Would they seem
| agitated? Or, would they just suddenly flip out? I imagine an
| unfamiliar human and unfamiliar environment is another story,
| though. This story is tragic.
| simonh wrote:
| They've also been known to tear fingers and hands off. In the
| wild the males will sometimes tear off a rival's testicles.
| Chimps are faster, more agile, much stronger than any human,
| and capable of extreme violence.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Chimps 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| We'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 wrote:
| Also, everyone knows that a tiger is dangerous, but you can be
| lured into a false sense of safety with a chimp...
| rdtsc wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| I 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.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| > I guess we are just as fickle and go from playful to violent,
| just like the chimpanzees they are describing in the article.
|
| 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.
| cobertos wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Opening 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?
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