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Posted: |
May 30, 2016 - 12:12 PM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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Considering the size difference, I strongly doubt they'd hit the kid with the dart gun. Unless the gorilla is handling the kid. Or near the kid. Or something improbably happens and the dart deflects off the gorilla and hits the kid. As much uproar as there is now, there would be even more if they'd killed a child. Or shoot it in the leg or something. Making him mad while there's a kid in there seems like a bad idea. They probably don't have many sharpshooters on staff who specialize in gorilla anatomy, and most places you shoot a creature won't stop it immediately without killing it. Perhaps a strong taser would have worked. When the kid is in the enclosure, I'm not sure where they'd find or mock up a strong taser. But even a taser, one, the effective range is like 15-25 feet, and the gorilla may have been deeper in the enclosure than that, and two, again, if the taser rated for a human doesn't have the stopping power for a 400 pound gorilla, or if something else goes wrong, then you've just escalated the situation. I think it's horrible that they killed the gorilla, but in the world that rates human life above any other animal life they probably made the least bad of a number of horrible decisions.
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Posted: |
May 30, 2016 - 12:35 PM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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They DID shoot the gorilla with a bona fide LETHAL weapon, so I dont know why you're making all these devils advocate cases. I'm making pragmatic cases. Darts don't fly as far or as true as bullets, and it takes several minutes for them to kick in. In an emergency when it's deemed necessary to stop something fast, a dart just doesn't cut it. (There are similar problems with tranquilizing animals for non-emergency reasons -- animals drown, for instance, because they get tranquilized, panic, run for the river, and then the tranq finally kicks in.) Again, this is an awful outcome. But I understand why the zoo made the decision it did. I'm making my case because I see a lot of fanciful notions about the effectiveness of guns and tranquilizer guns, and I'm trying to get across why the zoo's decision made sense given the tools that they had.
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