It is a generally accepted truism around the Grist offices that humans are jerks and it would serve us right if the natural world turned around and swatted us one. So we’re enjoying this video in which human jerk children get a well-deserved pants-peeing scare from a gorilla.
The kids, who were part of an apparently minimally supervised trip to the Dallas Zoo, apparently thought it would be hilarious to repeatedly yell “you ugly!” at the gorilla. What’s amazing is the array of emotions that plays (or, at least, appears to our anthropocentric eyes to play) over the gorilla’s face. Obviously he doesn’t understand that the kids are casting aspersions on his looks — and if he did, he’d probably just be like “look who’s talking, flatface” — but he does seem to grasp that he’s dealing with a slightly hostile but ultimately unthreatening mob. Hence his reaction: noble disdain, hairy eyeball, and finally OK ENOUGH YOU LITTLE SHITS.
Ah … never have the frightened screams of a child been so satisfying. If only all of nature were 300 pounds and angry.
