Woodland Park Zoo delays debut of baby gorilla 'out of respect' for Cincinnati Zoo

Woodland Park Zoo is delaying ;the public debut of its 6-month-old gorilla, Yola, for a week.

The zoo says it is to allow the mother and baby more time to become accustomed to being on view in the exhibit and out of respect for its colleagues at Cincinnati Zoo.

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Police in Cincinnati are investigating how a child was able to fall into a gorilla's zoo enclosure, eventually leading to the shooting of a 17-year-old gorilla in an effort to rescue the child.

Yola, is a  western lowland gorilla, same as Harambe, the gorilla killed at Cincinnati Zoo.

“We don’t take the responsibility of having these animals on grounds with the public lightly at all,” Martin Ramirez, with Woodland Park Zoo, said.

In addition to daily safety checks at all of the exhibits before the zoo opens for the day, Ramirez, a curator who is also part of the zoo's emergency preparedness team, said the staff regularly drills for worst-case scenarios, such as what happened in Cincinnati.

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“One of the things we do on a regular basis is prepare for any type of emergency whether it’s an animal injury, animal escape, guest injury or a guest injured in an exhibit,” Ramirez explained.

The gorilla exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo includes a glass viewing wall for visitors to get up close to endangered animals such as the western lowland gorilla.

There's also an open area designed to look more like the animal's natural habitat, similar to the Cincinnati enclosure where the boy somehow ended up this past weekend.

The boy made it past a 3-foot fence and through an additional 4 feet of plants and shrubs before dropping 15 feet into the moat below in Cincinnati.

To get inside the gorilla enclosure at Woodland Park Zoo, you would have to hop a rail, another mesh barrier, and a 15- to 20-foot wall before hitting the water.

The setup is similar at other open viewing exhibits, such as the sloth bear.

“I'm confident our containment and perimeters for our guests have all been thoroughly inspected,” Ramirez said.

There's been no security breach in the 37-year history of the gorilla exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo.

Cox Media Group