First a careless mother allowing Harambe the gorilla's death, then the callous father of Yamato Tanooka - these parents deserve our judgment

There are seldom few plaudits for people like me who choose not to have babies, and by default can visit National Trust houses without a SWAT team needing to take out the peacocks

Yamato Tanooka who went missing after being abandoned in a bear-inhabited forest in northern Japan was found alive and reunited with his parents (Getty)

One thing we've learned from the previous week’s examples of stunning, top class parenting, both in Cincinnati and the bear-infested Hokkaido region of Japan, is that several people who are able to reproduce really should use a condom.

At this point, modern parlance requires me to add the commonplace flimsy get-out mantra, “And I don’t like to judge” – though in my case this is nothing but a bare-faced lie. Petty mistakes I shrug off in an “Oh life!” manner, but just say you’re the type of odious simpleton who can’t have a nice day out at a zoo without one of the gorillas being assassinated – a tale which becomes more Roald Dahl’s The Twits with each telling – or a family jaunt without 200 earnest rake-wielding locals searching for your child’s bear drool-festooned carcass. Pull up a chair, I will judge in amounts bounteous enough for everyone. The fact that these two news stories have danced around the top of the internet news tidbit section on a worldwide scale for seven days now proves to me that I’m not alone.

Clearly, I have greater fire in the judgmental belly as I am a non-parent. A child-free woman. It makes me archly level-headed about children. So do the 56 solid hours sleep I have each week, which grants me squirrellish clarity of thought.

I’m child-free because I was always fully aware that kids have the potential to be such snot-encrusted, stone-throwing little shits. And that one day a red haze could descend leading me to be number two, after Taylor Swift’s love life, in the global click-news agenda. And like many child-free people I adore animals, including gorillas and bears. If Yamato Tanooka had fallen into the clutches of a bear it would have been permissible, I suppose, to blast the bear’s head off too for acting precisely like a bear in a notorious bear-infested region. This makes me sort of judgmental about where people like Yamato Tanooka’s parents take day trips.

But let me enjoy my moment of wild bosom-shifting and eye-rolling. There are seldom few plaudits for people who choose not to have babies, and by default can visit National Trust houses without a SWAT team needing to take out the peacocks, or anyone needing to strangle a particularly lively rabbit. Because there are no Clintons cards moments for people like us. No touchy-feely day with iced cakes, breakfast in bed and an accompanying cloying social media avalanche. I have been toying with the idea of starting a ‘Happy Child-Free Top Tax Bracket Day’ specifically for people like myself who give fist over fist of cash to the tax-man to pay for schools, child support and accident and emergency services clogged up by a cacophony of tiny twerps drinking Toilet Duck and pushing Crayola Twistable into the darkest crevices of their ear canals three or four times a week.

My new feast day for the child-free will be a chance for people who know which end of a condom is which and other folk who are aware that the morning-after pill works for 72 hours to gather together, in restaurants with non-wipeable menus, and talk judgmentally about things like the Cincinnati gorilla homicide and why it would have been tragic, but not exactly the end of the world, if the gorilla had lived another day.

I must remind you that poor minding-his-own-damn-business Harambe was shot just a fortnight after two 20-year-old male and female lions at a Chilean zoo were blasted to death after a suicidal soul leaped into the cage, aiming to offer himself up as a giant Whiskas Kibble. Instead of honoring the man’s wishes – namely, to die in the same manner as one of those decapitated voles I’m left frequently as gifts behind the sofa by my tabby – the zoo-keepers shot them dead.

I’m sure I’m not meant to be judgmental about this either, as the man patently had mental health issues, but if we’ve reached the nadir endgames era of mankind’s self-importance which says that the second human life enters a captive wild animal’s territory and faces danger, then the ethical thing is to blast the beast’s head off, well then it is time to give up on zoos.

Close them all. They are untenable and unworkable. We humans beings are clearly too important, too precious and far too sacred as entities to ever be culpable or even fleetingly responsible for our actions.

Women like Michelle Gregg, the mother of the boy who fell into Harambe’s cage, shouldn’t even be permitted to look at pictures of wild animals on Google Images lest it encourage them to go within 100 miles of an animal park causing carnage humans like her will never be classed as "responsible for". But she was responsible. On behalf of Harambe – and all of you too afraid to look bad – I’m more than happy to judge.