19
votes
When the great apes at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden broke free from their enclosure last winter, the keepers faced a terrible choice
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- Title
- One Swedish zoo, seven escaped chimpanzees
- Authors
- Imogen West-Knights
- Published
- Dec 5 2023
- Word count
- 7479 words
After reading that, there wasn't much focus on the process or procedures for how exiting and entering these restricted areas worked and more focus on whether they did the right thing after the escape.
The timeline on that isn't exactly clear, it sounds like it could just be a few minutes but who knows exactly. At some point, there needs to be more of a process in place than just an individual needing to remember to lock a door. If your post-escape plan is just to call in the hunters, then more care needs to be placed on not allowing an escape to begin with, assuming that you consider it a serious situation to kill chimps, which clearly it is.
When you add in the effect it has on the person who "forgot the door", I find it interesting considering a situation mentioned in this article about a different incident at a different zoo.
Now there's some situations where you can't make something completely error proof, sometimes its a matter of time or resources or combinations etc. so it's not possible off this one article to say for sure that the zoo was negligent in it's design of making it the responsibility of a single keeper to remember to lock a door or all hell breaks loose, especially considering they probably open that door multiple times a day. At that point it's not just "if", it's "when" because humans will inevitably make a mistake no matter how good they are at their job and if they're performing a task a number of times it makes the chances of happening in any one persons lifetime far more possible. There's certainly got to be a number of technological improvements they could have made at the very least to drastically reduce the importance of one person remembering to lock the doors, but the article doesn't really cover this aspect much to know whether some of these things were implemented or if not, why not.
An additional consideration after escape is with the situation of the former keeper of these chimps, Ing-Marie Persson, it introduces another element to consider, which is what level of risk you're able to give individuals. If they had allowed Persson in and make attempts to save the chimps and she ended up being killed by them, is the person in charge of the zoo at fault, even if Persson was willing to take that risk?
I think the outrage they faced after shooting the animals is a bit over the top to say the least, and it could be misplaced on the decisions after the escape, though I think the outrage stems from an overall perception of incompetence to the situation even getting to that point even if people don't fully realize it or express it in that way. At some point it is reasonable to shoot an animal in self defense or defense of others so I don't focus criticism solely on the decision to shoot the chimps that they did, but clearly the park leadership did not seemingly place much value on the zoo aspect of the park and placed more value on the amusement aspect and in some ways you can't help but notice how that trickles down into the small decisions that lead to such a situation, like neglecting details of procedures on how to enter/exit those restricted areas.
The outrage was fully justified. They didn't even try to capture the animals by non-lethal means and they murdered one of the infant chimpanzees who posed no threat to humans. Incompetence all around.
I agree that they were reckless and careless and should have made different choices, but
Apparently the tranquilizer would freeze in the dart and be ineffective...
They were working against time as the chimps would freeze to death overnight.
I read about the tranquilizer, but I find the whole thing very strange. They say the tranquilizer would freeze because they had no way to keep it warm, but the hunters that shot the chimps shot from inside a car. A car would be the ideal place to keep something warm, wouldn't it? If you can keep and load a firearm from inside the car, surely you can do the same with a tranquilizer gun. Seems to me like they could have at least save Linda and Torsten that way.
And then they say they had no secure place to keep them. How about the enclosure where they came from? They didn't break out, the door was left open. They could have been placed back inside with a closed door.
Tranquilizer guns/darts don't work the same as regular guns. The range of a tranquilizer gun is substantially lower because the projectile speed is lower. If you fired a tranquilizer dart at the same projectile speed as a bullet, you'd potentially kill the target in a similar way as if you fired a bullet. You'd need to reinforce the dart to be able to withstand the impact, because if you just use the standard plastic at higher impact speeds and it breaks, then it fails to inject the tranquilizer compound, but if you reinforce it, then it would end up being more damaging like how a bullet works. If you take away the projectile speed to lessen the impact of the projectile, then your effective range is lowered.
They would likely not be able to fire a tranquilizer dart from the safety of a car due to those range limitations. The further you test the range of the gun, the harder it is to actually hit your target, due to the low projectile speed, you'd have to adjust your angles of fire and what not and even still there's limits of range.
The other thing mentioned in the article is that chimps are too dexterous to rely on a tranquilizer dart. You can shoot a deer or a rhino etc. with a tranquilizer dart and hit them in many places where they might have a difficult time actually removing the dart from themselves, but you cannot easily do this with a chimp. There might be like one very specific spot on their back or something where you could hit them that their hands couldn't reach to pull out the dart, but hitting that one spot considering all the other factors just mentioned would be near impossible. Thus the delivery of the tranquilizer compound into their system is compromised. Furthermore, tranquilizers don't sedate an animal right away. So you have to get in close to hit them with a tranquilizer dart, with no protection of a vehicle or such, then in the event that you hit them they can likely remove it quickly and they might get angry and try to retaliate seeing as you just shot a dart at them.
I think there's a few components to what I was saying about the outrage being over the top, and one component perhaps I wasn't specific enough, the expression of that outrage was definitely over the top.
Saying the zookeepers are the ones who should have been shot is over the top. Clearly the zookeeper that was put in a situation of 'forgetting to lock the door' is having a hard time according to that person but also the general public's reaction to it likely has some role in that too. Any of the other things expressed in that article also show the expression of that outrage to be over the top. The overall focus being on what could have been done after the chimps escaped from the enclosure rather than what could have been done before they escaped is partly what I was addressing there, it's misplaced and thus also contributes to it being over the top. When you factor in some of the other things mentioned, being so critical in decisions after the escape of their enclosure is actually giving them an out.
The person who was in charge of that wildlife park was guilty of manslaughter for letting a keeper be in a position to get mauled to death by wolves. It wasn't really within the scope of that article to address the specifics of that incident, but clearly it was mentioned to contextualize the impact it likely had on other zoos and the people who operate those zoos. Trying to capture the animals by non-lethal means most likely would increase the risk of a human dying, even if only by a little. What's to say the person who decides to take that non-zero risk isn't possibly facing a manslaughter charge should things go wrong? This is what I mean when I say focusing on after the escape provides them more of a defense, the outrage here is over the top. It's an emergency situation at that point, they don't have the time nor necessarily the resources to change course, and every decision that is against your emergency preparation is a decision that could be your undoing. They have emergency preparation rules in place for a reason, because you can't always make the smartest decisions in the moment of emergency, you need to plan ahead when you're not in emergency mode to be able to make the best decisions for yourself ahead of time.
This was seemingly part of their emergency plan. The article didn't clearly delineate the full plan, it did talk about how tranquilizers were higher risk and difficult to make work because of the weather conditions, so it's not clear whether that was part of the plan but perhaps only worked in certain seasons and seemingly indicated it was better suited to some animals than others.
The focus on why they didn't improve processes/procedures and design of the enclosures before it was an emergency is where the outrage should be. Why were they putting all the responsibility on one keeper to be a machine that never operates erroneously and always remember to lock the door? Was their emergency plan inadequate?
That seems to potentially support that they did follow their emergency plans properly, and that's really the best anyone can do in those situations. You need to follow emergency plans in emergencies, that is precisely what they are there for. Humans are bad at thinking clearly in emergencies. But it is certainly within reason to critically evaluate whether they did proper work in developing their emergency response plans before that incident occurred.
That part is indeed over the top.
Offtopic, but we recently had a strange zoo escape story in my neck of the woods:
Escaped kangaroo punches police officer before Oshawa capture
Glad to see they didn't kill the kangaroo!
Yeah, and thankfully the weather has been relatively mild the last week too, so it didn't freeze to death before the authorities could find it. Although, surprisingly, supposedly Kangaroos can tolerate freezing temperatures far better than you might expect.