The Gorilla Had to Go because it's not about Justice

The prosecutor’s office is meeting with police to do something about the loss of Harambe, the gorilla who was killed by officials at the Cincinnati Zoo.  What, precisely, the prosecutor and police plan on doing isn’t exactly clear.  But, by golly, there has to be “justice.”

I wasn’t there and neither were 99.999999999999 percent of the people who are so “outraged” at the gorilla’s death.  So let’s get some perspective here.

First, only the Mom and maybe one or two other people actually know how the little boy got away from her.  Stop just assuming.  You don’t, in fact, know what happened because you weren’t there.

Second, this was a gorilla.  As the Judge in the Tommy the Chimp case said, "Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their action." (see my post here).   Just insert gorillas where it says chimpanzees.  No, there is no “justice” for gorillas because they’re ANIMALS.  That doesn’t mean the gorilla “deserved” to die, any more than a dog that bites a kid and is put to sleep “deserves” to die.  Animals deserve neither life nor death because they aren’t moral actors.  Gorillas don’t ponder the consequences of their actions – Harambe wasn’t wondering whether he should drag the boy around when he did it; he just did what gorillas do.  No one who is rational is blaming the gorilla but no one who is rational ought to believe Harambe was anything other than an animal.

Third, how is it that so many secular thinking people believe animals “ought” to have some sort of special “rights?”  I’m not talking about humans acting as good stewards of the planet because that’s a given.  I’m talking about the Tommy the Chimp kind of rights – the notion that somehow merely by existing animals obtain rights.  How is this possible?  If gorillas and chimps get rights, what about lower forms?  Do rats have rights?  What about spiders?  How about bacteria?  Where does the ‘right’ to “rights” end or does it?  Let’s face it people, if there is no God and we’re the sole arbiters of right and wrong, then this whole “justice for Harambe” thing is purely arbitrary and truly senseless.  He had rights; he didn’t have rights: it’s really all meaningless, anyway.  I don’t see people pushing for cockroach rights – but of course, there are zillions and zillions of them – plus they’re disgusting and disease carrying.  So we don’t care about them. We are inconsistent.  Gorillas are no more able to appreciate having rights as cockroaches are. (By the way, I’ll get to the “therefore babies in the womb don’t have rights, either” argument in a moment).   The secular view clearly depends solely and exclusively on totally arbitrary designations about which animals “deserve” rights and which don’t.  This is hardly a mechanism for any reasonable or rational discussion of rights and therefore not a reasonable or rational mechanism for discussing justice.

Yet, yet, for some odd reason many people are angry that this gorilla had to die.  And, YES, he HAD to die.  I’m not happy or pleased the Cincinnati Zoo personnel believed this was their only option, either.  But these folks are the experts and they acted under pressure and under troubling circumstances, making a very difficult choice.   I’m not in favor of killing such animals unless absolutely necessary.  But when it comes down to deciding whether an animal or human dies, I’m choosing the human, every time.  Even a crappy, no good, rotten, so and so, [expletive deleted] type human.  Why? Two reasons.  One, because as the eminently sensible judge in the Tommy case noted, animals don’t bear any legal duties or accept any social responsibility.  In other words, if you don’t have any responsibility, you don’t have any rights.  Second, and much more important, even the most corrupt human beings have a chance at salvation through the gospel of Jesus Christ; animals are not included in this offer (that doesn’t mean there won’t be animals in heaven, just that they aren’t “saved” like human beings can be).

Some will suggest my argument makes the case for abortion, since babies in the womb can’t have any responsibility, they don’t get rights.  The simple answer to that is babies have rights because God says so.  Moreover, babies in the womb will never come out as gorillas, or chimps, or dogs, or fish, or zebras, or elephants, or bacteria, or . . . you get the point.  They will only be human babies.  Humans are a special class, all to themselves.  Why?  Because we are the only part of creation made in God’s image.  Gorillas at the zoo, or in Africa, don’t get together for a colloquium entitled: Close Enough: Horseshoes, Hand-Grenades, and Humans, Why Humans Should be Called Gorillas and Given Gorilla Rights.  They simply don’t have the intellectual or moral capacity to fathom the concept of rights.  It is a uniquely human attribute.  It is so because we are not merely random products of the universe; we are not merely distant cousins of some primordial ooze.  We are something altogether different.  We are the very sons and daughters of the God of the universe.  As such, we are welcomed by him to repent of our sins and accept by faith that Jesus Christ lived the sinless life we couldn’t live, died the atoning death we couldn’t die, and raised himself from the dead, giving us everlasting life we could not obtain on our own.  No gorilla will ever receive this offer from God, ever. 

When you come to this discussion believing in a creator God, it changes everything.  Suddenly human babies do have rights.  Suddenly you do care that this gorilla was killed.  Suddenly you are worried about the little boy and how this event might affect him going forward.  Suddenly you care that the mom is apparently getting death threats (or at least people with her name are getting them) from people who weren’t there and have absolutely NO IDEA what happened.  Suddenly you care that people seem to be unable to logically process anything in these situations, but simply run on raw emotion.

Let’s face facts, people. 

Harambe had to die.  It’s sad, but true.  In the process, a little boy was saved.  It was not an equal exchange – the little boy is a human being – a unique and precious bearer of the image of the God of the universe.  Yes, he was more important than Harambe.  And not one of the “outraged” would be “outraged” if it were their child down there being tossed about by a nearly 500 pound gorilla. Not one.