Cincinatti Zoo officials shoot and kill gorilla after child falls into enclosure

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

As someone who really, really, really dislikes kids, I can see why choosing the life of some unnamed brat over that of one of the beautiful creatures you know and work with each day would be difficult for some.

Maybe I'm a bad person because of it, but hey, we've all got our priorities.

Of course it would be difficult. 

It was also the right thing to do. 

If their response of the zoo had been " that kid, the parents are dumbs," and people were largely ok with that, it would signal our culture had gone to a very dark place in terms of respect for human dignity.  This isn't just about whether a human life is more valued than a gorilla, but which people are valued and which aren't.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

To parts of Joe's point, I don't think "would you kill a human or gorilla?" is the right question. The dominating questions should be "how did a kid get in there?", "why do we cage gorillas in the first place?", "are there better options in the future?", etc. Pontificating about human greatness doesn't help much from stopping this.

OK, but provided that there was a zoo, that one of its cages had a gorilla in it, that a kid got there somehow, and that he would have died if the gorilla hadn't been killed, isn't this an important moral question to resolve? These things do happen and will sometimes happen. If we can't agree as a society on which of those two lives we value most, that's a serious problem.

It is. It's not crazy to have the view that the gorillas life should be saved instead, but it's definitely worrying.  It shows you how easily these sorts of shared values are lost without a firm agreed upon basis for them.