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Koko lightly takes my hand and places it in the bend in her arm before leading me around the small room, cluttered with soft toys and clothes designed to stimulate her imagination. I shuffle along the floor so as not to seem threatening, but it’s amazing how gentle she is.
My wife and I had a baby daughter just three weeks before my visit and I pull a photo out of my pocket to show her. I’ve learnt the sign – pointing to myself and then making a rocking motion with my arms – to indicate “my baby”. Incredibly, Koko takes the photo, looks at it, and kisses it. She then turns, picks up a doll from the mound of toys beside her and holds it up to me.
At one point she tugs lightly on my arm to indicate I’m to lie down beside her. Dr Patterson, who has been taking extensive notes of my interaction with Koko, says she can sense I’m nervous and does this to make people feel at ease. Another time she turns her back to me and indicates I’m to scratch it for her.
She swings herself up onto a large plastic chair and Dr Patterson turns on a video for her. It’s Mary Poppins, and Koko signals that I’m to sit next to her. If my day wasn’t surreal enough, it suddenly dawns on me that I’m watching Dick van **** while sitting next to a gorilla – an arrangement that Koko seems perfectly content with.
After two more hugs, Koko is coaxed away by Dr Patterson wielding a nut. And it’s over. I stand outside on the porch again and wave goodbye and she blows me a kiss, then puts her head up to the cage and puckers her lips.
I reach out and touch them and then disappear back up the path.
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Koko, if you’re not familiar, was taught American sign language when she was about a year old. Now 40, she apparently has a working vocabulary of more than 1,000 signs and understands around 2,000 words of spoken English. Forty years on, the Gorilla Foundation’s Koko project has become the longest continuous inter-species communications programme of its kind anywhere in the world.
A gentle giant with good manners.
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