Score!
Wow, I almost missed this one. Thanks for bringing it back up.
I volunteer with the gorillas in our zoo (I get to interact with them and work near them, but of course there’s always very heavy bars between us) and the keepers of course exercise appropriate caution and strictly follow protocols but agree that if the unthinkable happened and anybody ended up in the exhibit with the gorillas the worst they’d probably do is knock you down. (I’d be more worried about the smaller more assholish one.) They aren’t like chimps.
In fact, one of them did escape a few years ago (you may remember it making national news because somebody in politics made a racist comment about it) and just knocked somebody down before heading back on his own to the exhibit. (There are, of course, lots of people with guns who come running if the call goes out on the radio, but it wasn’t required that time.) The Dangerous Animal Escape protocols are much more forgiving of escaped gorillas than, say, the elephants. If you read it, you’d think somebody was just really itching to shoot an elephant.
This reminds me of two gorillas which were in the news, Jambo and Binti Jua. Jambo was a gorilla in the Jersey Zoo when a five year old boy named Levan Merrit fell into the gorilla enclosure on August 31, 1986, and was knocked unconscious. Jambo stood guard over the boy and protected him from the other gorillas. When Levan began to stir, he led the other gorillas back to their house.
Binti Jua also protected a three year old boy who fell into her enclosure on August 16, 1996 at the Brookville Zoo outside of Chicago. She picked the boy up then cradled him in her arm and carried him to an access panel where rescuers could retrieve him.
Both of these gorillas are good ambassadors for their species, contradicting the notion that gorillas are bloodthirsty monsters out to destroy people.
This video absolutely blows my mind. I’ve done a lot of things and seen a lot of wonderful stuff in my life, but this guy tops them all. We tried to go trekking after gorillas at Bwindi three times and never got any closer than eight hours of jungle slog away, along with a very unnerving experience with Congo border guards. They almost never come into the camp or anywhere close to it, which makes this experience all the more unusual. I am awed nearly beyond words.
That is amazing. I would be pissing-my-pants nervous if a wild silverback was that close to me, especially with all of those young gorillas and females around.
Great video, but we had a thread about this one a month ago.
Guess I missed it.
Missed this thread the first time around and just posted another one. :rolleyes:
No, it’s a tourist camp. We stayed in it back in the 90s, trying unsuccessfully to get on a trek into Bwindi. Our driver even tried to bribe us across the Congo border ::shudder:: We tried two more times, but the closest we ever got was the camp, as the gorillas were an eight hour jungle trek away.
I’ve never heard of a tourist being killed by a wild gorilla. You’re in far more danger from Congolese rebels in that area. This incident took place in the same camp we stayed in.
Merged threads.
That is amazingly awesome. I got to go gorilla trekking last year in Uganda, but the closest I got to a silverback was about 20 feet (the closest to any gorilla was about 3 feet. A blackback came up to us as we were approaching the group and slapped the ground in front of us). The whole experience was phenomenal, and I can only imagine how incredible it was for those in the video.
The guidebook I read said that the worst injury a tourist has ever sustained from a mountain gorilla in Uganda was a photographer who decided that the rules against flash photography didn’t apply to him, and a silverback who enforced said rules by taking his camera away and sitting on him, which resulted in a broken arm and a few broken ribs.