People never see this kind of thing coming in advance, mg. Anyone who raises an animal...it goes this way: at the beginning the animal is small, cute, playful, and lovable. Emotional bonds develop at that time between the animal and the owner. Those emotional bonds only become stronger as the years go by. Then some horrifying and totally unexpected incident may occur and the animal wounds or even kills an adult or a child, and the news media tells everyone in the world about it, and people all over the place freak out and want some kind of action taken because their state of mind just got jangled by something...action not just against that animal or owner, but against other owners of such animals.

I can't remember how many articles I've read about stuff like this happening with dogs. Probably hundreds by now. It's usually large dogs, but it can be small dogs too, and sometimes children or babies get killed by a dog that has been deemed friendly and harmless for years by everyone who knew it.

You can't make the whole world safe by passing a new bunch of restrictive laws every time something like this occurs. This was a very unusual situation with the chimp. Do you want every frikkin' municipality in the USA to now devote time to passing laws about owning chimps? I recall 2 news stories now in the past maybe 3 or 4 years where chimpanzees or a single chimpanzee attacked someone and did terrible harm. One occurred in a zoo out in California, I think it was.

These things are very bad when they happen, but how often do they happen? Very rarely. I felt positively sick when I first read about this story, so don't think I don't empathize with the victim. I do. I read about it in the newspaper, not online.

It's an awful thing, yes. It may make you feel safer to demand that "laws be passed" so it can't happen again...but you cannot make the world safe by continually passing more and yet more restrictive laws, and you cannot envision every unique situation that will aries, nor can you pass laws that will deal with them all. Bad things will still happen anyway, and you won't be able to set up any network of laws to stop them all before they do.

I think we've got too damn many laws already in North America, frankly, so my immediate reaction to an unexpected incident like this is not to start agitating for new laws...it is to realize that life is sometimes sad, frequently unpredictable, and that bad things can happen, and they probably will, laws or no laws. And that's life.