whence personal responsibility?

[cellio]

A story in today's paper reported that in Richmond VA, in a city park with fenced areas for animals, the park-keepers killed two black bears because one of them bit a child and they had to find out if there was a threat of rabies. (The only test for rabies in an animal kills the animal.) These bears have been in that park for years, and when the news broke (days after the deed was done), people in the community were outraged.

The child, four years old and accompanied by his mother, bypassed one four-foot-high barrier and then put his hand through a larger chain-link fence. The article didn't say, but I assume there were plenty of "keep away from the bears" signs too, in case two fences didn't make that point. The child got bitten (not badly enough to require stitches). Mom couldn't identify the biting bear, so both of the bears in that pen were killed.

Rabies is an unpleasant disease, but it is treatable. The treatment is painful, but many people have to undergo it because they have no choice. Sometimes you do something stupid and have to suffer the consequences; sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time and, yet, you still have to suffer the consequences. Life isn't fair, and sometimes no one is at fault.

Accidents happen, and the kid here is not to blame. For all we know, neither is the mother -- there are conflicting reports about whether she helped him climb the first barrier or looked away for a moment and he did it on his own. But that doesn't matter (except for settling the tort); even if this was completely an accident, a fluke, people have to accept some personal responsibility. It appears that someone made a decision to test the bears instead of treating the kid just in case; I think that decision was wrong.

There was clearly no fault on the part of the park or the bears themselves, so the child's discomfort is not adequate reason for killing the bears. The child, and the mother, could have gotten a valuable lesson about personal responsibility here, but they didn't. It probably didn't even occur to the parents, because we increasingly live in a world where the meme is "protection over everything, and when that doesn't work find someone to take it out on". But that doesn't help kids grow up into responsible adults, and you can't child-proof (and idiot-proof) the world anyway.

We are becoming, and raising, a nation of spoiled brats, who think that if they're unhappy, there must be someone to punish -- as if that makes anything any better. Punishment should be reserved for willful acts (including negligence). When there is clearly no fault, we need to minimize the overall damage, not our personal damage.

By the way, the bears tested negative.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

The kid, with all of the faculties of a four-year-old, has been attacked and injured by a creature that ranks right up there with "Lion" in our culture for archetypal powerful wilderness beast that kills people single-handed. We have the capacity to know just how easily this turned out, but I'm fairly confident the kid got the point well enough that there may be therapy bills down the road, and the marginal instructive value of painful shots would be pretty minimal.

I'm also inclined to ask considerably less of a kid that age in terms of personal responsibility, simply because they have so few tools to make the right decisions even in perfectly good faith. We're mammals, and that means we start out in a very dependent form that requires the grownups to take the responsibility on our behalf for a while.

Which leads to the real question, which is what sort of personal responsibility does the mom (and the park) bear on behalf of a kid too young to know better. My intuition says that the mother is probably responsible for not running herd on the kid well enough, and (as a result) for the deaths of the two bears as the (tragic but unavoidable, I think, given the points other commenters have made) consequence. Given that newspaper accounts are never good authorities for the details, I can't rule out the possibility that the park has some responsibility.

I also give the mother less of a pass than the kid, but I'm still not entirely sure what she's going through when everything's totaled up comes out as "coddling". A more interesting, more useful, and (pretty much as a consequence) much more complex question than "how should we have dealt with this after?" is "why do so many people who haven't (yet) nearly lost their kid to a bear think defeating evident security measures around wild animals can possible be an OK thing?"

[cellio]

The kid is too young to have really understood. I don't know if a bite mild enough to not require stitches will leave a lasting impression, but that's an aside. The real issue is with the parent(s). (I've now seen multiple stories; some say the kid was there with mom and some say with the parents, plural.)

Since the kid is too young to know better, the parents have to bear the responsibility for his actions, just like the owners of pets gone bad, the owner of the oxe that gores, etc are responsible for the outcome.

"why do so many people who haven't (yet) nearly lost their kid to a bear think defeating evident security measures around wild animals can possible be an OK thing?"

An excellent question. It seems so obvious to me (and I presume everyone reading this) that bears with big sharp teeth are behind fences for a reason, and maybe helping Junior climb the fence or neglecting to monitor him when he's within touching distance is a bad idea. This family got lucky -- the kid wasn't killed or maimed; the inuries sound minor.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

And that's the thing I'm curious about. I'm not convinced that it isn't simplistic to say that this is just a failure to take responsibility - I have no trouble believing that the parents wouldn't invite their kid to cross a four-lane highway, or take candy from strangers, or any of a laundry list of hazards, many of which are probably less risky than entering a zoo enclosure without appropriate training. I don't think it's because Mom figures "well, worst case, it will be a scratch and they'll kill the bears to confirm it's not rabies." I'd like to think that if she seriously considered that a likely outcome, she'd decide against this like all the other hazards she does protect the kid from. But for some reason, this didn't seem like as much of a risk as, say, wandering out of sight in the local mall, and that seems to be true of an awful lot of people that do manage to responsibly avoid an awful lot of risks.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Presumably the bears were fairly placid. I suspect she'd have paid better attention were they, for example, arguing and tearing apart a rabbit between them at the time.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Bears are *not* ranked up there with lions. Kids' videos are full of animated bears who are cute and entirely ineffective as warriors. Fat, friendly, slow, berry-eating bears. If I were to understand the world from 'family videos' I'd expect about as much peril from a cow as from a bear.

I agree that this is not reality, but you're assuming that real knowledge informs pupular culture.