08/30/2026
I keep thinking about the Milwaukee Zoo video, you know, the one showing a young boy inside the hornbill enclosure, chasing the birds. I was incensed, to be frank. Why were they videoing rather than going in to get the boy out, who has clearly lost his mind?
Then I thought about it more. I was concerned more for the birds, so what bothered others wasn’t what I thought their conversation should be about
Before anyone misunderstands me: this is not an opinion about an autistic child. It is not an invitation to ridicule his family, question his diagnosis, or pretend that autism somehow makes someone dangerous.
It is an opinion about animals.
Because I watched those hornbills, and one thought kept coming back to me: The birds were in their enclosure. The danger was walking around outside of it.
We build barriers around captive animals because we understand something fundamental: humans are unpredictable.
We use gates, locks, glass, moats, double doors, warning signs, staff protocols and emergency procedures because the animals deserve protection from the public, and the public deserves protection from the animals.
But what happens when the barrier fails in the other direction?
Those hornbills didn't leave their habitat. They didn't chase a person with a stick. They didn't provoke anyone. They didn't make a choice to participate in what was happening.
A human entered their space.
And suddenly, animals who had done absolutely nothing wrong were expected to absorb the consequences.
To me, that distinction matters.
I have enormous compassion for a child who may not have understood the situation the way an adult would. I have compassion for a family navigating a complicated disability. And I have absolutely no patience for people who use this incident as an excuse to harass, threaten, or dehumanize that family.
But compassion for the humans involved cannot require us to stop seeing the animals.
The boy may not have intended to hurt those birds. That does not mean the experience was harmless to the birds. And I think that is something we, as people who keep animals in human environments, need to become much better at understanding.
Intent and impact are not the same thing.
A parrot doesn't need to understand why someone grabbed it for the experience to be frightening.
A captive animal doesn't need to understand why a stranger entered its space for the intrusion to matter.
And an animal doesn't have to be physically injured for its welfare to have been affected.
Maybe the question we should be asking isn't simply, “How did this child get into the enclosure?”
Maybe we should also be asking:
“What responsibility do we have to the animals when the unpredictable variable isn't the animal but us?”
Because we have spent centuries learning how to contain animals.
Perhaps it is time we became equally serious about containing our own impact on them, all of them. Whether they are "cute" or not.
In loving memory of Time (Tee-Ma), an Grey African Hornbill, in our care after being smuggled into this country and losing both her feet due to frost bite.
