King Kong vs. Bokito
There used to be King Kong, now there is Bokito. This 400 pound silver back gorilla caused havoc in the Rotterdam Zoo last Friday. He escaped from his enclosure, grabbed a woman that was standing there, injured her (she has multiple broken bones and bites) and slightly injured three others. He then ran to a restaurant in the zoo where he broke through the glass before he could be subdued.
Of course gossip starts after something like this happens and within minutes stories get stranger and stranger. One thing that’s for sure is that the woman that got badly injured is a regular visitor to the Zoo. She goes there a few times a week and always goes to see Bokito too. She shows her teeth at him by smiling and she makes eye contact with him. Film footage from the woman and her husband at the zoo show this, as well as the woman thinking that Bokito smiles back at her and labeling the (to me) aggressive behavior he shows by hitting the glass and his chest as ‘cute’.
Right now the police is still investigating but according to a dutch news site called Nu.nl an eyewitness saw little boys throw rocks at the gorilla island. It isn’t unlikely that Bokito got angry because of this and felt he had to protect his group, including young, and charged. He jumped over a 4.4 meter wide river (2 meter deep) got hit by an electric fence and charged the woman. The Zoo director thinks Bokito recognized the woman and remembered her as a threat. Why? Because showing your teeth to a monkey and making direct eye contact isn’t submissive behavior to monkeys and therefor considered a threat.
I don’t think we’ll ever exactly know what happened or why Bokito did it. But I can find myself in the explanation above. The footage shows she’s doing it; she doesn’t deny going there a lot either and zoo keepers already asked her not to pay so much attention to Bokito anymore. With that said I don’t mean to say she deserved the attack. She probably honestly thought Bokito liked her smiling at him. I would have felt differently if she deliberately provoked him in any way. You don’t mess with animals; you don’t tease them or hurt them, period. And if you do you have to pay for your actions – animal style -
Which leads me to the following. If there were boys throwing rocks at the island, where were the parents? Why didn’t they stop the boy, or did they at some point say anything about it and did they just ignore it?
I know that my parents would never allow me to throw anything at any animal. Actually I wouldn’t even think of it, not even when I was a little kid and especially not now. Of course bystanders could have said anything but the times one hears ‘we believe in free upbringing‘ cannot be counted on one hand. I guess this is adult slang for ‘we don’t give a fuck what our kids do so don’t you dare say anything about it‘. Obviously that doesn’t count for all parents but it’s more common than you think.
Luckily the lady will be OK, she doesn’t blame Bokito and she will probably visit him again. Bokit is safely locked in again and he won’t go out on the island until they figured out a way to keep him (and the rest of them) in the enclosure.
Let’s just hope other monkeys don’t hear this and copy his escape while I’m at Antwerp Zoo in a few weeks…
3 Comments on "King Kong vs. Bokito"
This was in the Danish news as well! I heard a conspiracy theory about the Dutch Zoo wanted to top the news over the German Knut to gain tourists – That is of course bull.
In Aalborg Zoo – close to where I live I rarely see people behave stupidly around the animals. It’s a nice zoo to visit and there a a lot of zoo keepers around the animals who does a great job telling stories and such – maybe to keep children occupied.
Children will always try to push limits – sometimes parents aren’t better though. When the tigers and lions are fed in our zoo I often see parents push away children so they can get a better standing position with their camera’s – like experiencing the thing isn’t as important as having it on film. It makes me embarrassed to see grown up behave like that – but it also somewhat tells me where their children get it from.
I heard about the whole ‘trying to top Knut’ story too. Actually here they now say that Bokito is the new Knut.
Maybe I should mention that Bokito escaped before when he was still in the Berlin Zoo. He climbed over a three meter high glass wall. So I think the zoo underestimated his abilities. Even though the water part was wider than it’s supposed to be by world standards he managed to get out. So Bokito is quiet something.
Children always push limits and that’s good. But parents are there to actually teach them that limits are there for a reason. Parents are sometimes worse than children, I agree with that. Some kids got a mouth on them they could only ever learned from their parents. It’s saddening…
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OMG! That’s SO scary!
See… that’s why I’m usually scared of animals. I love animals — in pictures. I’m all for treating them right and all that but I feel uneasy when I go to zoos or when I take a hike where I could potentially run into an animal. You just don’t know what they can do.
Oh, and yeah… where were the parents of those kids who were throwing rocks at the island?