The White House has posted on social media a tribute to mark Thursday\u2019s 10th anniversary of the death of a figure it called \u201ca true patriot\u201d.<\/p>\n
The hero was not a human, however; it concerned the infamous case of the 400lb western lowland gorilla that had been named Harambe, which was shot dead at the Cincinnati zoo after a toddler entered his enclosure and interacted with the animal.<\/p>\n
In a lengthy post<\/a> on Wednesday evening, what would have been the primate\u2019s 27th birthday, the official government account mourned \u201can icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation\u2019s timeline\u201d.<\/p>\n Security staff at the zoo shot and killed<\/a> the male silverback on 28 May 2016 after the boy, three-year-old Isaiah Dickerson, climbed a fence, crawled through a hedge, and dropped 15ft into the enclosure holding Harambe and fellow gorillas. Video captured the gorilla pulling the boy, who received only minor injuries, through water.<\/p>\n The incident became a viral internet sensation<\/a>, prompting memes, tributes both fake and real, music<\/a> and poetry, and calls for sports teams to be renamed for Harambe. It also sparked safety improvements at the zoo, which reopened its gorilla enclosure a year later with higher walls and other barriers.<\/p>\n Wednesday\u2019s bizarre 123-word memorial post to the animal by the White House, which remained silent<\/a> when the former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney<\/a> died in November, evoked that aftermath.<\/p>\n \u201cHe became a symbol of loyalty, strength, chaos, unity, and the strange beauty of the internet bringing millions of people together for one cause: never forgetting Harambe,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone remembers where they were when they heard the news. And somehow, a decade later, his legacy still lives on. Gone, but never forgotten. Rest easy to a true patriot.\u201d<\/p>\n Harambe was born in captivity at a zoo in Brownsville, Texas, in May 1999.<\/p>\n Soon after the 2016 incident, Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, spoke of how it was \u201cso beautiful to watch\u201d Harambe with the child.<\/p>\n