[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Cyber bullies forced the Cincinnati Zoo to shut down it’s Twitter account earlier this week over the killing of Harambe in May. While I feel whole hardheartedly bad for the staff at the zoo, who work hard and do their best every day, it again points to a serious discrepancy in how things are handled in society today.
It makes absolutely no sense that a business that serves the public would be so harassed and intimidated online they feel the need to close it’s social networking account to protect it’s employees.
In case you don’t remember Harambe and the chaos caused when he was killed by zoo staff, let me remind you. In May of this year a 3-year-old African American child fell into a supposedly secure gorilla enclosure. The child was in the gorilla put alone with the 450 pound Harambe. After Harambe started to drag the helpless child through his habitat, zoo employees made the tough decision to kill the animal to save the child. The child survived with minor damages.
The internet and animal rights activists immediately went wild. Not only were they livid the zoo had killed Harambe but they blamed the mother of he child for his death. The family, who should have been celebrating the safe rescue of their child was then inundated with threats and calls for them to be investigated by CPS, arrested, assaulted and even worse.
That was May 2016. It is August 2016, the harassment, internet memes and chaos surrounding the death of Harambe has not died down. This past weekend, the cyber bullies took the Harambe fight to a new level, a very low one at that. First someone hacked the twitter account of the zoo’s director, Thane Maynard , changing his profile picture to a photo of Harambe. The next day the zoo was forced to deactivate it’s account after being bombarded with tweets and memes about the beloved ape.
“We are not amused by the memes, petitions and signs about Harambe,” Thane Maynard, zoo director, told the Associated Press in an email. “Our zoo family is still healing, and the constant mention of Harambe makes moving forward more difficult for us.” An online petition seeking “justice” for Harambe has garnered more than half a million signatures. What kind of justice do they expect?
Now I DARE you to ask yourself, have you heard anything about Disney being harassed? I’m not going to go into a full diatribe about how I feel about this as I feel I said I clearly enough in My article Save the Gators, Crucify the Parents. See just weeks after the Cincinnati Zoo incident where the child was rescued safely another child was killed at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. A child was killed due to the negligence of the Disney Corporation staff as well as the child’s parents. Lane Graves was taken by an alligator from a body of water with a sign that said “no swimming” while his parents were just feet away.
Disney had no signs warning of alligators. Subsequently it come out that alligators were reported seen nearby. In an attempt to find the child before his body was discovered, at least 5 alligators were killed. The public sympathy was palpable, everyone felt for the poor parents who broke the rules and put their child in harms way. Disney quick to quiet it down, hurried to install new signs, comped everyone affected by the death at the resort free rooms and settled with the parents quickly and quietly. The parents have since announced they will start a foundation in the name of their son.
The Graves family has never been harassed. Disney has not been harassed. A CHILD died. The employees of the Cincinnati Zoo, who are simply STAFF and do what they are TOLD, has been harassed, threatened and cyber bullied because an animal was killed to save the life of a child. Think about that.
The zoo still has active accounts on Instagram and Facebook. A quick check of their Instagram page shows that the cyber bullies are now leaving messages on all the images there. Will it ever stop?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
