A 2-year-old gorilla died of traumatic injuries last week at the Calgary Zoo in Alberta, Canada, after being struck by a hydraulic door that a staff member mistakenly activated, according to the zoo.
The western lowland gorilla, named Eyare, who was the offspring of gorillas at the zoo, had been interacting with other gorillas on Nov. 12 in an enclosure where they are fed, observed and trained outside their habitat.
A staff member was trying to separate Eyare, who weighed about 30 pounds, from the other gorillas for a vaccination training session.
“A team member intended to activate a door that they were looking at, but accidentally used the control lever for a different door,” Colleen Baird, the zoo’s director of animal care, said in an interview on Saturday. “And as that door was closing, Eyare was passing through, and she was struck by it.”
Teams attempted lifesaving measures, but Eyare died shortly after 9:30 a.m.
Ms. Baird said that the staff member operating the door was “devastated,” and that the person was immediately removed from the workplace. The staff member was not a new employee, and was comfortable working with gorillas, Ms. Baird said.
The staff member will undergo additional training before returning to work in that area of the zoo, which is home to six other western lowland gorillas.
Ms. Baird said that the zoo, which was founded in 1929, planned to take corrective actions, including an assessment of the locations and design of the door controls.
Ms. Baird added that the zoo planned to change the levers so that staff members would be able to more easily identify which doors they control.
Eyare’s death was not the first time that an animal died in an episode involving a hydraulic door at the Calgary Zoo, which is home to more than 4,000 animals.
In 2009, a capybara was killed by a hydraulic door, and a spider monkey died in the same manner, according to Animal Justice, a Canadian animal law advocacy group.
In 2016, an otter, Logan, drowned after it became entangled with a pair of pants given to the otters by a zookeeper.
That same year, seven penguins drowned after being moved to a holding area while their habitat underwent renovations. In 2008, more than 40 stingrays died from oxygen deprivation.
Over the last 10 years, the aging animal population at the zoo has died at an average of 3 percent per year. The fatalities were geriatric or disease-related, aside from the deaths of Logan and Eyare, the zoo said.
“It’s not like there’s a complete data set out there, but I would say the Calgary Zoo seems to have an unusually high death rate,” Camille Labchuk, the executive director of Animal Justice, said on Saturday.
A 2010 review by the Canadian Association of Zoos and Aquariums found that the annual number of animal deaths at the zoo nearly doubled to about 200 from 2000 to 2009, according to Maclean’s, a national magazine based in Canada.
The increase did not appear to be related to a change in the size of the animal population.
Ms. Baird said that the deaths of the capybara and spider monkey happened at an older facility that is no longer in use. She also cited the Calgary Zoo’s openness as a reason for the heightened attention.
“We have a transparency policy, so we want our community to know what’s going on, as it’s going on, within hours of an incident,” she said. “We don’t wait for an incident like this to happen for us to make a change.”
Eyare’s death has sent ripples through the zoo’s community.
“I say goodbye to animals on a regular basis because they are aging out, or they’re geriatric,” Ms. Baird said. “This one hurts. This one is not planned. This one is a mistake.”
The post 2-Year-Old Gorilla Dies After Being Struck by Hydraulic Door at Zoo appeared first on New York Times.
