THE DEATH OF A BABY GORILLA

Professor Volker Sommer, a leading evolutionary anthropologist, said in one word: incompetent. And we add one more: irresponsibility. That’s how London zoo is appearing to public opinion of its country and of the world for not avoiding the death, which was a certainty, of a seven-month-old baby gorilla, Tiny – the first gorilla born in the zoo in 22 years – when he was introduced with a alpha male called Kesho, who had just arrived from another zoo.

Professor Sommer, an advisor to the International Union for Conservation of Nature on great apes, questioned in a letter to London zoo: "What on Earth did ZSL expect to happen? Any undergraduate student of zoology could have told you what to expect!. How can it be that ZSL, an organization known for being guided by scientific knowledge, ignores findings that have been accumulated over the last 40 years?"

And as a conclusion, he pointed: "As a logical conclusion, London Zoo should not keep apes anymore."

The story told by the zoo is that Kesho’s arrival last year was recommended by experts to create a cohesive social group, after the death of the zoo’s previous male gorilla. Then they tried to introduce the mother Mjukuu and her baby, Tiny, with the new male, who ended up attacking both of them.

The baby was rescued alive and during three hours the vets – who do not know the body of a great primate and did not call a human physician to help them – tried to save them, unsuccessfully.

It was a sequence of lack of responsibility: the attempt of join a mother and her baby with a new male who is not the baby’s father; do not let the baby grows up until he was a teenager before introducing him with a strange; do not ask for help of human physicians to try to save the baby, when it’s known that vets do not have the chance to study in depth the physiology of a great ape, which is very similar to human’s.

Before this tragedy other two gorillas had died in this zoo a few years ago. Unfortunately this is common in the majority of zoos all over the world and the mortality rate of great apes in zoos is scaring. As far as we are informed in Brazil – unfortunately some zoos hide the deaths – four chimpanzees died in the country in the last few months: chimpanzee Rita, at Sorocaba zoo (São Paulo), the mother of chimpanzee Pongo, who is with us at Sorocaba sanctuary, at Belo Horizonte zoo (Minas Gerais) and two chimpanzees were victims of drowning at Pomerode zoo (Santa Catarina).

It is logical that environmental authorities in every country have to come to the conclusion that continuing to allow the exhibition of great primates in zoos is a way of contributing with the extinction of the species, which already are in a fast countdown for extinction in the wild.

Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian
President, GAP Project International