Bokito, A 400-Pound Gorilla, Goes on Rampage when Asked to Be cute!

A recent event in the news is the violent and unexpected escape attempt by Bokito to express his anger at being kept in a zoo. He started his wild rampage suddenly, escaping somehow from his pen and sending the people on holiday running in a panic. He injured four people, giving a forearm bite to one woman, and then smashed his way into the restaurant. He was finally subdued inside the restaurant.

While they don't know how Bokito escaped, zoo officials believe they know why. Moments before his outburst, Bokito was being taunted for not being as cute as the polar bear cub at another zoo. Keep in mind that Bokito is a 400 pound gorilla, cute is not something that comes naturally to him. Kicking people's heads in and taking names when he is upset is what comes naturally to him.

With all the attempts to humanize the treatment of animals in a zoo, this shows that perhaps the animals are not as happy as we wish they could be in zoos. Zoos, while existing for hundreds of years, have always been a matter of removing the animal from its natural habitat to put it in a situation that is anything but natural.

Where do we draw the line with animal rights and Bokito's quality of life? Another recent action by human right activists is to give chimpanzees human rights for as close as they are to containing an equal number of chromosomes. Is this right? Should this happen? It is up to how we view ourselves and our humanity.
Back to the Bokito, gorilla in question. Under pressure to act more "cute", being heckled by the crowd, disrupted from his normal routine, Bokito finally cracked. Under the stress, I think anyone would have cracked a lot sooner, and with much more vindictiveness.

I can't draw enough comparisons to the movie Planet of the Apes and Charleston Heston's role in the film. The pivotal moment when he escaped from his captors and uttered the words "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty apes."