“Harambe,” is the Swahili word for “pull together,” a popular rallying cry.

It is also, fittingly, the name of the dead gorilla that united the Internet in grief and ire.

As you probably already know (and if you don’t, I envy you), Harambe, a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla and former resident of the Cincinnati Zoo, was shot to death by zoo officials on Saturday after a 3-year-old boy fell into the primate’s enclosure.

It was remarkable the boy survived the fall (roughly a five-metre drop), and equally remarkable he survived his 10-minute encounter with Harambe, who dragged the boy through a moat before zoo officials killed the gorilla.

But perhaps the most remarkable chapter in the Harambe tragedy — a.k.a. Harambe-gate — was the torrential downpour of emotion that followed the gorilla’s demise.

I am not being hyperbolic or facetious when I say that the social media aftermath of the incident rivals, in public anguish and bloodlust, the online response to a terrorist attack.

The only thing missing from the fray, at this point, is a customized Harambe Facebook photo display (caption, “We Stand with Harambe”) and charges of selective sympathy from people demanding to know why North Americans care more about the plight of western lowland gorillas than they do about their eastern counterparts.

The headlines write themselves: “Yesterday poachers murdered 12 orangutans in Borneo, but you were too busy crying over a gorilla from Ohio to notice.”

And then there is the mother of the toddler — a woman cyber-scorned, who thought it wise, in a now-deleted Facebook post, to opine about the “awesomeness” of “God,” whom she believes spared her son from death by gorilla.

The mother’s public piety, in the eyes of the trolls who continue to shame her, is further evidence that she is not only negligent, but simple-minded, too.

And yet, so are we all.

The most patently alarming element of Harambe-gate is not that a little boy could traverse a zoo enclosure, or that zookeepers would shoot an endangered animal to protect the life of a child, but that so many grown, thinking adults believed without a shadow of a doubt that a 450-lb. spooked gorilla would befriend and shelter a child from harm.

(If only we gave him the chance!)

This — even though experts, while lamenting the animal’s death, ultimately supported the decision to shoot.

Tranquilization may not have been sufficient to knock him out; time was of the essence.

Maybe his intentions were friendly, but why take that chance? (The gorilla’s caretaker told media that it was possible for Harambe to kill a human by accident while playing).

Even primate authority Jane Goodall, who did consider the possibility that Harambe wasn’t dangerous, wrote a letter of sympathy to the zoo. “I feel sorry for you having to try to defend something which you may well disapprove of,” she wrote.

But public consensus is clear-cut: Harambe, the gentle giant, was murdered in cold blood.

I watched the video of the incident, and I, too, wanted to believe in the friendship between boy and gorilla, because like other Harambe grievers with limited intelligence of primate behaviour, I grew up on films in which little kids win over the hearts of misunderstood, majestic beasts.

And like anyone else, I enjoy a good animal meme.

“The Internet and social media have raised our empathy and awareness of animals by exposing us to more animals in general,” Alex Abad-Santos wrote in Vox this week.

Maybe this is true.

But it’s also allowed us to convince ourselves via YouTube instant replay and lightning-fast Wikipedia searches that we are genuine experts on complicated events and creatures we know next to nothing about.

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(I wonder if our kids will better in this regard, having grown up not on Free Willy and Mighty Joe Young, but Wall-E and Planet Earth).

I suspect the only thing that matches our newfound, boundless love for Mother Nature is our soaring ignorance about how she works.

After all, if Jane Goodall isn’t even clear on what happened at the Cincinnati Zoo, then we haven’t a clue.