Help!
I’m trying to remember the name of the Bronx Zoo gorilla who, a few years back, proved surprisingly clueless in the romance department and had to be coaxed big time into making little baby gorillas. Does anybody remember his name and what year it was? Help is genuinely appreciated.
Braintree
His name was Dan.
http://www.burrelles.com/transcripts/cbs/tmor9808.htm
google.com, “Bronx”, “gorilla”, “sex”. English. Search.
Total elapsed time, 3 seconds.
Close, but no cigar. Dan wants to have sex but can’t get any cooperation. The case I have in mind was the opposite problem: Plenty of randy interested females but a clueless male. That’s a pretty good information source you got there though.
I’m not familiar with the precise gorilla you had in mind, but I do know that breeding programs for primates in zoos have had a lot of difficulty, precisely BECAUSE apes are highly intelligent, social animals.
Let’s put it this way: when a 12 year old human girl gets pregnant, does she know instinctively how to breast-feed, or how to care for an infant? Of course not! But female opossums (or cats or squireels or whatever) DO know instinctively what to do. Under nature/God’s (you decide) plan, lower animals and asocial animals usually KNOW how to do most of the things they must do to survive and propagate. The more intelligent animals, especially the social ones, have to learn from observation how to do things.
Examples: a cow KNOWS how to eat grass, and pigs KNOW how to dig up dirt for roots. They don’t have to be taught. But a wolf pup has to be TAUGHT how to hunt. A cow or pig that escapes from the farm CAN survive on its own. But wolves raised in captivity probably WON’T survive in the wild, because nobody’s ever taught them what to do.
Well, just as human teens need a “birds and bees” speech, apes need to see how reproduction and child-rearing work. If they aren’t taught, they’re likely to be clueless. Even when a gorilla manages to figure out what his penis is for, and has sex with a female and impregnates her, the female probably won’t know what to do with her new baby.
It gets very complicated when you’re trying to raise intelligent, social animals in utterly unnatural settings like zoos.
They can however give themselves blowjobs.