If somebody’s going to keep up the nasty habit of cigarette smoking, at least they could keep it to themselves instead of chucking a lit loosie to an innocent animal for laughs. Not that there isn’t something innately funny about an orangutan ripping a dart, but this poor thing!
The Fort Worth Zoo recently went viral when a video showed two keepers stuck in an enclosure with a male silverback gorilla. Thank goodness, they made it out OK. But then, we have this orangutan controversy right around the same time (h/t Brittany Jaldin on Facebook):
Dallas-Fort Worth ABC affiliate WFAA reported on both incidents, and included a statement from a zoo spokesperson on the orangutan smoker, which read as follows:
“It’s incredibly disheartening. Never did we imagine having to comment on something like this and hate to think that a Zoo visitor would harm our animals.”
Having a think on this issue, I think that the only acceptable scenario to make an animal start smoking cigarettes would be with some special effects Hollywood magic in service of a comedy movie.
Thinking back to Grandma’s Boy, the monkey in that movie didn’t actually smoke, just got behind the wheel of a car in a clearly-fake, quite funny sequence. However, in The Hangover Part II, we saw a little primate quite convincingly light up like he was a mini Humphrey Bogart.
Writer-director Todd Phillips is most known for his comedies, and during an exhausting press tour, where he and all the creative talent are accustomed to being asked the same questions many times over, he made an offhand joke about how PETA was after him for the monkey getting addicted to smoking cigarettes. Phillips later had to clarify that he was indeed joking about that, and further indicated that the monkey didn’t, in fact, do cocaine either.
But in the case of the Fort Worth Zoo orangutan, this actually did happen in real life. Who wants to smoke at a zoo in the first place, by the way? The animals are already in enclosures and can’t roam around as freely as they would in the wild.
Now you’re gonna subject them to poisonous smoke instead of natural, fresh air? Come on now. Do better, whomever you are who let an orangutan bum a cig.
