The Dead Gorilla That Set the Internet On Fire

May of 2016 the internet blew up about this particular event that happened at the Cincinnati Zoo when a 4-year-old boy had fallen into one of the animal enclosures. A man had noticed that the young child had fallen in and began to shout “There is a boy down there.” His mother began panicking screaming out to the boy “Mommy’s here, Mommy loves you!”

Zookeepers over hearing all the frantic yells, it came to their attention that they would have to make a decision about the boy’s situation. Fearing for his life one of the zookeepers on standby made the hard decision to kill Harambe with a single shot. Luckily the boy escaped without little injury. The situation was captured on YouTube and has had millions of views. This stroke a lot of people’s hearts and the concerns of the zoo’s welfare standards and whether the decision to use lethal force was the necessary way to go about it. The Cincinnati zoo later stated that “It is important to note that the child still in exhibit, tranquilizing the 450-pound gorilla was not an option.” “Tranquilizers don’t take effect for several minutes and the child was in imminent danger, on top of that the impact from the dart could agitate the animal and cause the situation to get much worse.” The one thing that everyone didn’t expect to happen was that Harambe become extremely popular through the use of memes and was even used as the subject in campaigns.

A lot of controversy followed with the situation that had happened. People were divided with the treatment that the gorilla had gotten, Witnesses at the Cincinnati Zoo and the millions of people who have watched the video began calling their opinions. Some of them believed that Harmabe was protecting the child as if he was one of its own offspring. Others reckon that Harmabe was violently dragging the child around the enclosure.
    



Harambe became quickly memeified and exploded all over the internet. It brought a lot of different sides to the story and some very unessessary and offensive memes. The ones above show the negative side of the internet. Memes are known for a joke but the one that is about Adam Goodes isn’t relevent to anything that happened at the Cinninati zoo. Aiming it at a particular person is not what it should be used for esepcially when it’s not in any way related to that person. Some were more humerous than others and was used a lot more appropriatly. An account tweeted “They call it gorilla glue because Harambe was metaphorically the glue that held this nation together” making a poke at the wide controversal fact that people believed that the animal should not have been put down and that they missed him.


The Zookeepers made a very hard but important decission by putting harambe down in the regards of keeping the young boy alive and out of harm, Although what it is going to become of in the future with other zoos when they have other potential life saving incidents. Is killing the animals going to start becoming something that won’t be really discussed, It is going to have to be the only option when others have purposoly put themselves in danger? And is the memes encouraging others to perform such acts where they’re putting themselves and the animals at risk for the soul fact of becoming a meme on the internet?

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