harambe, the day everything went wrong.
17 years old. quiet. enormous. soft.
♫ play this as a companion while reading harambe's story ♫
press play whenever you're ready ☂
who was he?
harambe was a gorilla. western lowland, which is a real subspecies, by the way, not just a label someone made up. he was born at a zoo in brownsville, texas, on may 27th, 1999, which means he was a may baby, like a lot of people i love.
they moved him to cincinnati in 2014, when he was 15. he was supposed to grow old there. he weighed about 440 pounds. his mom, moja, outlived him. i don't know what gorillas think about all day. probably food. weather. who's looking at them. where they'd rather be sitting. the same as the rest of us, but wider.
what happened
on may 28th, 2016, one day after his birthday, a three-year-old kid slipped through a fence at the cincinnati zoo and fell about ten feet, into the water of the gorilla enclosure.
harambe walked over. for ten minutes, he stood near the boy. sometimes holding his hand. sometimes dragging him through the moat. it's hard to know what he was doing, and i don't trust anybody who says they do. it might have been protection. it might have been confusion. it might have been the kind of mood any of us could have on a tuesday.
the zoo had to choose between a tranquilizer dart and a rifle. tranquilizers take minutes to land, and a 440-pound animal who is annoyed for those minutes is a problem with a small child inside it. so they shot him. one bullet. the kid was fine. everyone else, in some smaller way, was not.
and after
the internet didn't know what to do, so it did everything at once. people grieved. people made jokes. people made jokes about the people grieving. "dicks out for harambe" ended up on millions of screens, and i typed it into a group chat once, and i still couldn't tell you exactly why.
i think a meme is sometimes just sadness wearing a costume. a way to keep talking about a thing that should hurt, without having to admit out loud that it does.
the enclosure. quiet now. always was, kind of.
a small thought
if you're reading this on a rainy afternoon, somewhere far from cincinnati, and you find yourself a little sad about a gorilla you never met, that's allowed. it doesn't have to make sense. it doesn't have to add up to anything. the rain falls on every enclosure equally.
i made this page because i wanted somewhere that took it seriously for one minute, before going back to being a website about sad monkeys. so. one minute.
rest easy, big guy. ☂