Seven escaped chimpanzees

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/05/one-swedish-zoo-seven-escaped-chimpanzees

by zabzonk • 3 years ago

79 62 3 years ago

theguardian.com

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

I hope they're captured before they decide to run for Parliament.

dang• 3 years ago

Please don't do this here.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

Horrible situation with the escaped chimpanzees, but in this tough situation, I think the zoo made the right call. Human safety comes first.

cduzz• 3 years ago

100% agree -- a horrible situation from start to finish.

You really don't want to be in the same room as a chimpanzee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Davis_chimpanzee_att...

rob742• 3 years ago

The article mentions another case:

In one particularly horrifying incident in 2009, a chimpanzee called Travis who had been raised by humans from birth mauled his owner’s friend, biting and tearing her face, ripping out her eyes, removing one of her hands and most of the other.

Horrifying indeed...

jtbayly• 3 years ago

"The chimpanzees destroyed a majority of St. James's fingers, his left foot, most of his buttocks, both testicles, part of his torso, and parts of his face including his nose and his lips."

Two male chimps.

bedobi• 3 years ago

Disagree. I know nothing about Zoos, animal keeping or what have you but... chimps gotta eat, couldn't they just have approached them with treats laced with sedative?

+ in general, in case of situations like this, Zoos should be required to employ people with enough fortitude and good enough relationship with the animals to approach them to dish out said treats, or throw a net on them or whatever, maybe wearing riot gear and other protective equipment or what have you but yeah there should be a requirement that someone takes some degree of risk before jumping straight to shooting the animals, especially if they haven't even yet displayed any aggression or anything. It seems to me Zoos jump straight to shooting them because it's the safest (for them), quickest and cheapest way of ending the situation, which isn't good enough.

Actually, Zoos should be banned period lol but yeah.

tptacek3• 3 years ago

The article discusses this option.

NewJazz2• 3 years ago

Flagging my comments doesn't make your life more valuable than that of a chimp.

zlg_codes4• 3 years ago

I've paid attention to how flagging happens on here, and it's strikingly similar to how reports are used on reddit and other sites.

I guess it's not a big surprise considering reddit was basically a fork of HN, but it's something I've noticed. The features of websites get abused to facilitate antisocial behavior.

wolverine8763• 3 years ago

Human safety comes first.

Let's look deeper at the real question they faced: How much risk (of life and limb) is it worth to save a chimpanzee's life?

Obviously the answers aren't 0 or 100%. If it was 0%, then we wouldn't have zoos, zookeepers, pets of many species, farms, etc. 100% means it's worth trading certain death for a human to save a chimpanzee - arguable philosophically, but for the sake of this discussion, I'll rule it out.

The answer is in-between. Everyone takes risks around dogs, horses, cattle - small children play with most of them. Zookeepers take much greater risks, it seems, around wild animals. So do hunters, tourists, etc.

How much risk do we tolerate? Do zookeepers take 1/1000 risk of death over their careers?

RationalDino4• 3 years ago

The fact that the head of another Swedish wildpark got convicted of manslaughter over the death of a keeper. Given that, it would be hard for those in charge to allow any worker to take risks to save these escaped animals. Even if the worker was willing to do so.

That answers how much risk we're willing to tolerate.

justrealist• 3 years ago

What would you do about escaped dogs?

pvaldes2• 3 years ago

The question here IMAO is if they escaped by their own means or received external help.

Similar history happened in other zoos subject to animalist harassment (with "free the chimps" campaigns for months if I remember correctly). Finally the chimps escaped somehow in 2015. One was shooted and the other died drowned not much later. Maybe somebody naively expected a different outcome or even still regret to participate in that campaigns. We'll never know.

Chimps are known to be furry Houdinis in any case, but yes, they can be very dangerous.

nabla9• 3 years ago

4 dead, 1 wounded, 2 uninjured chimps.

niccl• 3 years ago

I'm curious about what failure of budget or imagination meant there was no alarm to indicate that the outer door was open at the same time as the door between enclosures?

Surely it would be a simple and relatively cheap (low hundreds of dollars) to set that up. They had obviously already had done significant risk planning, so how come nothing for prevention apart from Standard Operating Procedures? the new funfair management team vetoing the budget? Zookeepers not thinking that way?

wolverine8763• 3 years ago

Lack of hindsight. IME, in every situation there are a million such issues and you can't invest resources, including limited staff time, in fixing them all.

NewJazz2• 3 years ago

I think the simple answer is that zoos are held together by duct tape and optimized for human entertainment, not animal welfare or even the safety of visitors.

skilled• 3 years ago

I actually don’t think they made the right call and whomever wrote this article, began it by planting a seed in the readers mind that these chimps are killers and will maul people on first contact.

Of course that will make you think that they did the right thing, but is it actually true that no person interacts with these animals directly across the world?

It sounded to me like sheer ignorance and complete lack of experience of the people who worked there. I don’t blame them seeing as how they are located in the middle of nowhere, and having the right people at hand might not be optimal, other than one of the other women who actually had connection with the smart chimp.

But that woman was denied entry. And yet she was probably the only person who could have accurately judged the situation for what it was as opposed to “what it could have been”.

chasil4• 3 years ago

The problem is that a single unlocked door led to the unavoidable termination of these animals.

There were no attempts to lure them back to the enclosure (to which they would likely have returned due to the low temperature), no other attempts at capture, and no other plan than termination.

When escape of the enclosure is a lethal threat, then the enclosure needs greater protections to prevent mandatory termination. There should be at least three levels of containment, using doors with mechanisms that the animals cannot manipulate.

Facilities that cannot meet these containment standards should be forced to surrender them to those who can.

tptacek3• 3 years ago

Part of the calculus behind shooting them appears to have been the likelihood that they would have suffered a worse death from the cold if they didn't return to the building, and with the light failing, the opportunity to spare them that death was passing.

suzzer99• 3 years ago

This is what bothers me the most. Design the system so it doesn't rely on keepers remembering to lock doors. For one shift door to open, everything else must be locked down.

pvaldes2• 3 years ago

The problem is that a single unlocked door led to the termination of the animals.

The problem is that this "can't" happen.

Zoo animals in harsh climates always sleep indoors in a big inner room heated. This main room can be accessed by a minimum of 2 doors. One (or several) leads to the external part of the exhibition. This play area will typically have a moat, that gradually gets deeper, and a high wall. Chimps are poor swimmers (they sink like a rock on water) and the wall is designed to avoid escapes. If the animals escape to this enclosure they can't proceed further and are not a danger for the public so shooting them wouldn't have any sense.

The other door leads typically to a small logistics area, used to store needed stuff (brooms, fresh hay etc) or to interact with the animals safely. This small hall is accessed trough a second locked door. Sometimes you can't open the room door without locking first the pre-cage door. The design encourages having at least one locked door at any time.

The building itself will typically have a main door, the third, to allow access from the outside

One unlocked door means that the chimps will be contained in the broom's hall. Even with two unlocked doors this could end with the chimps trapped inside as long as you have solid windows (as expected in Sweden).

In this case both locks were left opened at the same time,

two or maybe three doors unlocked by night, in the middle of a harsh weather (any opened door would lead to a noticeable chill air current inside the building, or even maybe to the electronic heater system triggering automatically an alarm)

stevenwoo2• 3 years ago

The latest series of Planet Earth III shows chimpanzees crossing roads and farms to reach their foraging areas, the farms have just popped up and encroached on the land they normally just roamed. Nobody tries to approach them and the chimpanzees don’t do anything aggressive in the stuff that was aired. The elephants were much more dangerous at least in the segment they showed from Kenya where they kept stats on number of elephants and humans killed per year.

swalling2• 3 years ago

That series is really good, but chimps can be incredibly dangerous when in close proximity to humans. In rural Africa, there have been numerous reports of conflicts with wild chimps, including them abducting and killing children. https://archive.ph/2b4MJ

standardUser• 3 years ago

The famous story of a woman having her face literally torn off by an otherwise friendly and trained chimpanzee has caused a lot of fear around chimps that didn't exist before. I have no idea how common it is for a chimpanzee to decide to maul a person, but it absolutely does happen. I would rather they kill the chimp than allow even a small risk of it maiming or murdering a person.

tcbawo• 3 years ago

I would love to know how quickly and unexpectedly a chimpanzee would turn on a familiar human. Would they seem agitated? Or, would they just suddenly flip out? I imagine an unfamiliar human and unfamiliar environment is another story, though. This story is tragic.

simonh2• 3 years ago

They’ve also been known to tear fingers and hands off. In the wild the males will sometimes tear off a rival’s testicles. Chimps are faster, more agile, much stronger than any human, and capable of extreme violence.

hulitu3• 3 years ago

There are humans who do this. Do you recommend killing all humans just to be sure that this wouldn't happen ?

Where were the tranquilizer shots ?

dimator• 3 years ago

there is a lot of armchair quarterbacking in this thread.

i don't know why the people who were trained to raise these animals, lived with them, LOVED them for years, and came to the excruciating decision to terminate them are being treated as amateurs. from my reading of this article, the decision, although difficult, would have been made exactly the same way today. the paramount concern in zoos is always human life. they knew these animals best, and they knew what they were capable of.

i don't envy the keepers there that day, this will unfortunately be a cloud over their whole career/life.

dist-epoch• 3 years ago

Chimps are considered by many more dangerous (to humans) than tigers or lions.

Because they are smart. With some luck you can trick a tiger. Much harder with a chimp.

mynameishere• 3 years ago

If a tiger attacks you, it will go for the neck and you will die. Chimps attack humans just like they attack other chimps, and that means going for the face, hands, and genitals. I'm not even sure there are any humans who've been killed by them. They just horribly torture people and let them live.

It's hard to ascribe evil to an animal, but chimps are clearly working on it, heading up the evolutionary ladder.

zlg_codes4• 3 years ago

We're genetically related, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that our closest cousins are also mean as hell. We didn't become the apex predator of this planet for no reason.

rob742• 3 years ago

Also, everyone knows that a tiger is dangerous, but you can be lured into a false sense of safety with a chimp...

rdtsc3• 3 years ago

That's terrible what happened. It was hard to read about the 3 year old Torsten getting shot...

Two separate legal investigations into the park over their conduct are ongoing, one for the alleged crime of neglecting human safety in allowing the chimpanzees to escape, and another for violation of Sweden’s Animal Welfare Act in killing the four apes.

That's a bit of a catch-22 situation. Had they instead gone to file the animal welfare act euthanasia paperwork, they could be even more liable for neglecting human safety. If they called the hunters, and killed the animals, presumably so they don't harm humans, now they are breaking the animal safety law.

“The animal keeper that forgot that door has had a very, very tough time,” Wilke told me. The public reaction has also not been kind. “When we read people say that we’re the ones who should be shot, that we’re monsters and savages, it’s horrible,” said Beldt.

I guess we are just as fickle and go from playful to violent, just like the chimpanzees they are describing in the article. Random strangers are quite happy to have the zoo keepers shot over this.

jjk166• 3 years ago

I mean if you imagine a scenario like leaving a vehicle running such that a human child could drive it around out of control, and to protect people from the vehicle you killed the kid, we'd undoubtedly be complaining about both letting an innocent being in your care get into the situation where they posed a threat to others, as well as dealing with that threat by killing the innocent being.

The sin is not killing the chimpanzees, the sin is creating a situation where they had to kill the chimpanzees.

rdtsc3• 3 years ago

I don't quite want to entertain the parallel, it's a bit too gruesome... In a way it would imply there is a paper form one has to fill to call the "hunters" and allow them to shoot. So then the state would raise an objection about not filling the paperwork, while also objecting that the human lives were put in danger. But then if they sat down and started to fill out forms and mail them in to get permission, they would have gotten in more trouble over putting lives in danger for even longer. So it's a Kafkaesque kind of a situation.

zlg_codes4• 3 years ago

I guess we are just as fickle and go from playful to violent, just like the chimpanzees they are describing in the article.

Doesn't take much time in this world to derive that fact. Humans are not the logical, order-following, intellectual beast some of them see themselves as. We are, at best, clever monkeys who are good at detecting patterns and making up bullshit for the tribe to swallow.

rdtsc3• 3 years ago

Indeed, I just thought was interesting as that's how the chimpanzees were described and then here are the people described doing the exact same thing just a few paragraphs below.

cobertos• 3 years ago

I wish they would have followed up more in the ending section with how the CEO (Wilke) felt about it in totality, specifically their decision to shoot. Their reflections on the events say a lot about if/how the park has learned from it

RationalDino4• 3 years ago

The former keeper left the zoo over frustration that the zoo prioritized rollercoasters over the animals. That speaks louder about the CEO's thinking than anything that the CEO might say about it.

verisimi• 3 years ago

Opening paragraph:

The problems began when Linda was about 18 months old. For a year, she had lived in harmony with a Swedish couple and their three young children in Liberia. Hers had not been an easy start in life. As a baby, in 1984, she saw her family shot by poachers in the Liberian jungle.

Perhaps they should call in chimpanzee psychotherapists to help them over ptsd, no?

Seriously, why anthropomorphise in this way? Are chimpanzees people?

djmips• 3 years ago

December 2022

davidhyde• 3 years ago

I wonder if they ever considered evacuating the village of 800. Seems like default human behaviour is to subjugate rather than run and think.

Seven escaped chimpanzees

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