The chimp was drowning, and this hero knew he had to act.
This raw footage from 1990 shows a man saving a drowning chimp at the Detroit Zoo. He ignored the threat of the more aggressive apes and jumped into the enclosure to help.
While everyone was standing around watching the chimp drown, Rick Swope couldn’t do the same.
“I happened to look into his eyes, and it was like looking into the eyes of a man, and the message was, ‘Won’t anybody help me?’”
Breaching the boundary of a zoo enclosure can be deadly and is prohibited. But in this case, it saved a life.
