Koko the Gorilla "adopted" kittens: skepticism . . . .

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Disclaimer: over the past 7-8 years my wife and I have fostered and adopted out about 25-30 rescue cats, and have even taken in about 7 ourselves. So maybe my opinion on this in a BIT tainted . . .

I’m sure many of you have heard by now that Koko the Sign Language Gorilla left this Vale of Tears recently at 46. Part of her legacy was her friendship with kittens, which on the surface, seems sweet. And, to an extent, it probably is.

The more I dig down, I do have a few questions and concerns, and NONE of this it to blame the now demised ape:

—If I have this straight, her first “adopted” kitten was Small Ball----who apparently was hit by a car, devastating Kiko. Why would a zoo/animal shelter allow a cat to run free as an outdoor cat???:mad::mad::mad:

—The claims Kiko “adopted” Small Ball and other kittens: the videos I saw showed that all visits were carefully supervised, and in one, when the kittens rode her back as she was walking into her shelter, Kiko’s minders quickly grabbed the kitten as it was in danger of getting knocked off her back from the top of a tunnel she was crawling through.

—This was less of an adoption than a carefully supervised interaction between two species. As gentle as Kiko may have been with the kittens, surely she with the strength of 8 Olympic power lifters could not be trusted to comfort, let alone with limited intelligence, care for, these delicate felines without accidentally injuring one of them.

I get it: Kiko played nice with kittens under human supervision . … could we knock it off with the “adopted” crapola? Kittens are VERY delicate creatures, with a higher than many expect heartbreaking mortality rate. They are NOT playthings, gifts, or toys. I get the researchers were trying to prove how “human” gorillas are. And I don’t have a problem with that.

But please, stop equating an animal using a smaller furry creature as a plaything to making the time, financial investment and emotional investment into welcoming a new cat into your home for the next 10-20 years. The ape didn’t “adopt” the kitten, at best she put up with it, under human supervision.

Adoption is truly a Lifetime commitment.

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I would need to know more before I could conclude one way or another. Do I find it credible that animals have affection for other animals? Yes. Do I think Koko was the sole caretaker? No. Would I trust a gorilla with a fragile object or animal? It would depend on the gorilla, but the answer might be yes.

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They seem to do OK with infant gorillas.

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There were certainly plenty of assertions that Koko’s use of language was greatly exaggerated by her keeper, in order to keep up funding.

These assertions did not seem baseless, at least to me.

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I actually had thought that it was generally understood that Koko’s use of sing language was exaggerated. Cecil’s column from 2003 shows a little equivocation, but generally leans toward skepticism.

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russian heel, is your concern that the general public actually believes Koko literally adopted those kittens?

Because I don’t think anyone on the planet could actually be that dumb.

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I actually have the book, Koko’s Kitten. The name of the kitten was All Ball, not Small Ball. There is nothing in the book about Koko “adopting” the kitten. It’s given to her as a gift. My impression from the book is that Koko considers the kitten her baby, and treats it as such. At first she is given daily supervised time with “Ball” and as Ball gets older it sounds like he was free to roam the property (not a zoo or animal shelter) including the gorilla habitat, which was “only fifty feet away” from Dr. Patterson’s house, and would even visit Koko on his own. I’m not familiar with the Gorilla Foundation so don’t know what sort of setting it has or had. I do think it was more common back in the early 80s (Koko’s Kitten was published in 1985) to let cats roam, especially in more rural locations.

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Oh trust me, I’ve met people even dumber. Lots of them.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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I know American Sign Language, and I’ve seen the heavily edited videos of Koko signing. I can’t understand them. My Deaf friends can’t understand them. Basically, Dr. Patterson was the only one who understood Koko’s signing. Some of her assistants may have “understood,” after a lot of training by Patterson.

From what I understand, Patterson used to speak and sign at the same time to Koko, which means she wasn’t modeling a signed language the gorilla could use that had grammar and syntax.

IF Koko did sign anything deliberate at all, she signed completely on the semantic level, not at all on the syntactic level. She mostly used single signs to ask for things she wanted. She did not do anything that resembled conversation.

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Obviously a Gorilla probably won’t be able to deal with all of a kitten’s needs but it is amazing how gentle and affectionate they can be across lines of species:

Video here of a female Gorilla cradling and seemingly protecting a young boy that fell in an enclosure:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=puFCuMac0Vk

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The OP has a very strict definition of adoption. A small child who is too young fully to fully care (feed, wash, cleanup after) and animal can be considered to have adopted that animal and do no more than Koko did, i.e. show great affection. Watch a show like “Unlikely Animal Friends” and you’ll see multiple references to animals adopting animals of a different species as their surrogate parent, child or companion. With the rare exception of a mother animal nursing her adopted child, the highest level of care is possibly protection against other animals. Most of the time it’s just interacting with each other.

Here’s the Wiki article on Koko’s kittens and how All Ball died:

"Researchers at The Gorilla Foundation said that Koko asked for a cat for Christmas in 1983. Ron Cohn, a biologist with the foundation, explained to the Los Angeles Times that when she was given a lifelike stuffed animal, she was less than satisfied. She did not play with it and continued to sign “sad.” So on her birthday in July 1984, she was able to choose a kitten from a litter of abandoned kittens. Koko selected a gray male Manx and named him “All Ball”. Penny Patterson, who had custody of Koko and who had organized The Gorilla Foundation, wrote that Koko cared for the kitten as if it were a baby gorilla. Researchers said that she tried to nurse All Ball and was very gentle and loving. They believed that Koko’s nurturing of the kitten and the skills she gained through playing with dolls would be helpful in Koko’s learning how to nurture an offspring.[39][40]

In December 1984, All Ball escaped from Koko’s cage and was hit and killed by a car. Later, Patterson said that when she signed to Koko that All Ball had been killed, Koko signed “Bad, sad, bad” and “Frown, cry, frown, sad”. Patterson also reported later hearing Koko making a sound similar to human weeping.[40]

In 1985, Koko was allowed to pick out two new kittens from a litter to be her companions. The animals she chose, she named “Lipstick” and “Smoky”, were also Manxes.[41] Koko picked the name after seeing the tiny orange Manx for the first time. When her trainer asked the meaning of the name, Koko answered, Lips lipstick. Dr. Patterson was confused until she realized that Lips had a pink nose and mouth, unlike All Ball’s gray markings. Koko picked Smoky’s name because the kitten looks like a cat in one of the gorilla’s books.

To celebrate her birthday in July 2015, Koko was presented another litter of kittens. Picking two, she named them Miss Black and Miss Grey.[42]"

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We had a German Shepherd “adopt” two kittens who were too young to leave their mother when said mother rejected her litter.

Princess carried the kittens around, groomed them, supervised their play, warned them for being too rough, and watched over them even through their adult lives.

Are you supposing gorillas are less capable of complex social behavior than dogs?

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It really kind of makes me mad.

I first learned of Koko from National Geographic. I never considered Nat Geo to be anything but factual. If they said Koko was using sign language, I believed them.

But over time, I find out that, hey, maybe she’s not really using syntax. OK. But she still uses words. Right?

Now we find that she’s probably not even signing at all. That the whole thing was “facilitated communications”. That is, Koko moved her hands randomly, and Patterson “interpreted”. Nat Geo shouldn’t have been fooled.

And this is why people don’t trust science.

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No, Koko really did sign.

Just not, you know, sign language.

She did lots of signs for particular words. So she could sign for a food she wanted, or whatever. Or that she wanted to see your nipples.

She didn’t have conversations in sign language, but she could make some signs and understand some signs.

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Wha? The gorilla signed to see nipples? I thought only creepy guys on the internet did that.

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Did she do lots of signs for particular words, or did she make a lot of hand movements until she “said” something that her handlers interpreted as a word? I’ve seen some of the unedited tapes, and she tended to move her hands a lot until one of the movements was interpreted as a word.

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I had a german shepherd who did something similar with an abandoned kitten. He groomed him, watched over him, generally acted as his parent. Later in his life, the same dog adopted a dove. He’d save some of his food for the bird, chase any other birds away, let the bird walk between his legs. I have no idea why this dove was his friend, but it was cute.

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Crap. I can’t get my pets to tolerate each other. The cats ignore the dogs until they don’t. Both dogs have received the cat slap The dogs are kinda dim but they don’t mess with the ‘meezers’ from hell.

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How do you know those aren’t gorillas?

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You’re so right.:slight_smile: