The story of Harambe, the gorilla who was shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after endangering a young boy, is different legally from the story of the alligator who killed the boy in a Disney park as mentioned in our previous post in a few different ways but the topic we are continuing to focus on is negligence. The Cincinnati Zoo is less likely to receive a legal fight from the visitors to the park than in the Disney Park issue because they not only reacted to the situation immediately after the boy fell into the animal enclosure whereas search/rescue efforts in Disney took 16 hours simply to find the boy’s body. The larger part is that when a family enters the Zoo they are accepting a certain amount of risk in being so close to these wild animals. You are willingly coming here to be close to animals and accept risks associated with that whereas an animal altercation at a Disney Resort | ![]() |
within the park is not at all involved with the expectation of the Resort. So in terms of negligence claims these two incidents were quite different when on the surface one may have grouped them together.
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