Toddler Falls Through Bars into Rhino Exhibit, Now in Recovery at Hospital
Animals can be unpredictable, just like people can. With other humans, it’s easier to communicate and understand when someone might be acting out and why, but it’s hard to tell with animals.
Barring venomous critters, the bigger the animal, the more potentially dangerous it is. That’s why it’s important to learn to read animals if you’re going to be around them; you need to know when they’re relaxed, nervous, excited, or angry.
When the creature is a rhino, one small wrong move can mean death — and not because the animal is mean or vicious, but just because it’s so large. Thankfully, this encounter seems pretty mild, but it has still left people shaken up.
At the Brevard zoo today when a little girl fell in rhino pen. Pretty crazy. pic.twitter.com/C1X9M58Wbr
— Scott Henkle (@OnslaughtGame) January 1, 2019
One family was starting out the new year with adventure when parents and their 2-year-old girl visited the Brevard Zoo in Florida. To make the visit even more special, they signed up for a rhino encounter.
There are safety precautions in place: A zookeeper escorts the guests into an area alongside the exhibit where guests can “meet” the rhinos. There are large steel poles that keep the rhinos contained, but allow people to reach through to brush them and participate in other low-key, supervised interactions.
On this particular day, the toddler managed to find herself stumbling into the pen where one of the female southern white rhinos turned to her and “made contact.”
Keith Winsten, the executive director of Brevard Zoo, explained the scenario in more detail during an interview, according to Florida Today.
“Today at approximately 12:12 during one of our regular, scheduled rhino encounters, which is a special educational program we do every day for groups that sign up ahead of time, we had approximately a 2-year-old child who, while being held by the father, stumbled back and fell between the bars into the rhino exhibit,” Winsten said.
“This is a flat, level exhibit, there’s no fall per se, it’s just she fell into the rhino exhibit, parents immediately leapt to bring the child out,” he continued. “Two of the female rhinos turned, we think at least one made contact with her snout with the child.”
“They pulled the child out, the child was crying and had a small abrasion on her face, and we immediately called ambulances and the family was taken away in ambulances.
“We don’t know the nature of the family’s injuries, we don’t know the condition of the child, obviously our first concern is for them and our hearts go out to them because it was always a place for fun and learning.”
Winsten also explained that this is the first time anything like this has happened during the program’s nearly 10-year run. He said that the zoo has “stopped them for now until we review our policies and procedures and make sure we put policies in place to make sure this can never happen again.”
The child’s father said in a statement, “We’re thankful to everyone who has reached out with their concerns. Our daughter is in good care and is doing well.”
The zoo released a statement reassuring people that the rhinos would not be “punished” in any way, though the zoo will be reviewing their other encounter programs as well to try to prevent something like this from happening again.
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