Bokito, A 400-Pound Gorilla, Goes on Rampage when Asked to Be cute!

A recent event in the news is the violent and unexpected escape attempt by Bokito to express his anger at being kept in a zoo. He started his wild rampage suddenly, escaping somehow from his pen and sending the people on holiday running in a panic. He injured four people, giving a forearm bite to one woman, and then smashed his way into the restaurant. He was finally subdued inside the restaurant.

While they don't know how Bokito escaped, zoo officials believe they know why. Moments before his outburst, Bokito was being taunted for not being as cute as the polar bear cub at another zoo. Keep in mind that Bokito is a 400 pound gorilla, cute is not something that comes naturally to him. Kicking people's heads in and taking names when he is upset is what comes naturally to him.

With all the attempts to humanize the treatment of animals in a zoo, this shows that perhaps the animals are not as happy as we wish they could be in zoos. Zoos, while existing for hundreds of years, have always been a matter of removing the animal from its natural habitat to put it in a situation that is anything but natural.

Where do we draw the line with animal rights and Bokito's quality of life? Another recent action by human right activists is to give chimpanzees human rights for as close as they are to containing an equal number of chromosomes. Is this right? Should this happen? It is up to how we view ourselves and our humanity.
Back to the Bokito, gorilla in question. Under pressure to act more "cute", being heckled by the crowd, disrupted from his normal routine, Bokito finally cracked. Under the stress, I think anyone would have cracked a lot sooner, and with much more vindictiveness.

I can't draw enough comparisons to the movie Planet of the Apes and Charleston Heston's role in the film. The pivotal moment when he escaped from his captors and uttered the words "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty apes."

The pressure is on zoo officials to not only provide a safe environment for the animals like Bokito in their possession, they are also under increasing scrutiny about how the animals are maintained. An effort by activists has also led to a reduction of circuses that have animal acts in them, trading them instead for gymnasts and specialty acts.

Recent events in Asia have also seen a reduction in animals being poached for their internal organs for suspicious remedies of congenital diseases and tropical ailments.

None of this compares of course to the issue of global warming and how it is effecting the animal world, how Bokito's natural environment is no longer there. More and more animals are being threatened with climate altering conditions and the effect on the food chain is causing devastation of enormous proportions. While we make every effort to save these animals, the fact is we can't return them to their natural habitats when their original homes are no longer there, being overran with hotels and strip malls.

All of this points to the fact that if we don't care for the animal kingdom, animals like Bokito, the food chain will be permanently disrupted. Already reports that the amount of edible fish in the ocean will be severely reduced in a matter of decades and the ability to desalinate water effectively and cost-efficiently is still some years away.

At the end of the day, we have to look at Bokito and wonder if he was shouting "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty humans."