Gorilla or kid? Kill the ape

Today’s problem is that nobody lives in the country anymore.

Here we are fretting about a gorilla being shot when it was dragging a 4-year-old around like a rag doll.

We’re fretting about Harambe the gorilla being killed at the Cincinnati Zoo, as opposed to the 4-year-old being killed.

Honestly.

I never lived in the country, unless you count the suburban sprawl of Ridgeland when we lived in Greater Grahamville.

Now, we did have a donkey for a neighbor. We called him Eeyore. I guess he liked to escape from the pasture because they had a No. 5 wash tub roped to his leg. Don’t you know that hurt his feelings? It’s a wonder he didn’t sue.

And our Labrador mix was accused by a neighbor of being an egg-sucking dog. Which meant he might come home with some lightweight shot in his hide. It did not seem to hurt Cannon’s self-esteem, but we were far enough out in the country to know who was at the top of the food chain, and that Mother Nature plays for keeps.

That’s what happened, thank goodness, when a 4-year-old managed to get inside the zoo habitat of a 420-pound gorilla. The gorilla was shot.

It’s a shame to lose the gorilla. I know how people get attached to their gorillas. I grew up in Atlanta. Willie B., the zoo gorilla, was the most popular character in town. When he died, more than 2,500 people attended his memorial service. A lady from Stone Mountain told the newspaper: “I know that’s an ape, but Lord knows he felt like a family member.”

My grandparents lived in the country good and proper. That’s where I learned as a child the cruelty of nature. We seem to have forgotten it in an air-conditioned world, where people jump to conclusions and scold each other by pecking out mean messages on their cell phones.

At the farm, it was a breathless stunner as a child to realize that a tom cat would kill two sweet kittens we had been fawning over in an empty house down by the peach orchard.

At the farm, we saw pigs called from the field by banging a bucket on a fence post. And when one got close enough to the barbecue restaurant owner, it was shot and hauled away.

At the farm, we saw how Granddaddy loved the king snake that showed itself by the smoke house. He prized it for eating varmints — especially rattlesnakes. That was a lovely image for a kid from the city to digest.

At the farm, we heard about the days of yore when plowing was done by mule. The mules had to be beaten every Monday morning because every Sunday they thought they had retired.

People in the country know more about the brutality of life than today’s iPhone set appears willing to accept.

When a gorilla is dragging around a helpless child, you shoot the gorilla.

Life is not a petting zoo.

This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 4:23 PM with the headline "Gorilla or kid? Kill the ape."