Daily Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas

Opinion

Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Sage Views

By Smokey Briggs

Natural selection
at the Dallas Zoo

Three cheers for the Dallas Police Department - or at least the decision by one or more officers to shoot the gorilla that escaped its pen and attacked four people.

The tree-huggers, or in this case, the gorilla-huggers are not as pleased as I am.

According to Associated Press reports the mentally lame in the area have held candle light vigils in memory of Jabari.

The zookeepers seem a little peeved as well. I suspect that their indignation is fueled more in an attempt to shift blame from their own screw up which allowed the animal to escape in the first place.

That was the crucial error. That is where blame should be laid.

With four people including a toddler mauled the officers on the scene made the right choice when they shot and killed the animal.

The gorilla huggers disagree. They argue that the police should have left the situation to the “trained professionals” of the zoo’s staff.

I presume this is the same staff that let the gorilla escape in the first place.

I can also only presume that not shooting the animal when the opportunity arrived might have led to more injured or even dead people.

That seems fine with the morons crying on television holding up signs in memory of Jabari.

Funny, no one had a sign with the picture of the child who was carried around by Jabari in his teeth.

This bunch obviously value the life of a gorilla over that of other human beings.

Most of them probably were not in the path of Jabari when he was using his 350 pounds to beat up his smaller but smarter cousins.

If they had been I will bet my last nickel that they would have been shouting, “shoot, shoot the monkey,” at the top of their tree-hugging lungs.

However, even when faced with hypocrisy such as this, I pride myself on my compassionate nature, and I have a few words of solace for those weeping over Jabari’s demise.

As tree-huggers, no doubt you are fans of Darwin’s theory of evolution that suggests that natural selection winnows out the chaff of weaker animals and species.

I am.

As devotees of evolution the grief stricken can take comfort in the knowledge that what took place was simply a small step in the Darwinian circle of life, as the Disney boys would euphemistically describe Jabari’s death.

You see, Jabari may have weighed 300 pounds, but his lineage does not contain such brilliant minds as those of Sam Colt or Dan Wesson.

In the end, the power of the mind won out over brute force when the police pulled the direct successors to Colt’s and Wesson’s designs out of their holsters and opened fire. So cheer up guys.

Jabari’s death was a natural event. It was part of the whole circle of life thing.

Personally, I am most disappointed that no safety minded citizen put the animal down earlier into the fray.

It says a lot about the cowed nature of the citizens of Dallas if obviously so few patrons were armed with something that would take care of a single gorilla.

Some how, I would bet the situation would be different if the same thing happened at the Pecos Zoo.

Return to top

Pecos Enterprise
York M. "Smokey" Briggs, Publisher
Division of Buckner News Alliance, Inc.
324 S. Cedar St., Pecos, TX 79772
Phone 432-445-5475, FAX 432-445-4321
e-mail news@pecos.net

Associated Press text, photo, graphic, audio and/or video material shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium.
We support Newspapers in Education
Copyright 2003-04 by Pecos Enterprise