A lot has been written about the death of Hanabiko, a captive-born western lowland gorilla, on June 19th at her home at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, California. Better known as “Koko,” she was born on the 4th of July, 1971, at the San Francisco Zoo. She gained international fame after her primary caregiver, Francine Patterson, taught her a variant of American Sign Language known as Gorilla Sign Language (GSL), while also communicating with the gorilla in spoken English. By being able to communicate with humans, Koko exposed, as never before, the simple fact that a non-human could have a range of emotions and cognition different in degree – but not in kind – from what humans possess, and, in fact, within the range of what is found in humans. It was claimed that she understood about 2,000 English words and had a GSL vocabulary of about 1,000 different signs.
Typically, there were naysayers who opined that Koko’s abilities were exaggerated or misrepresented, and that she did not make use of syntax or grammar, putting her linguistic development on a par with that of a young human child. All of that happened out of context of the conditions in which Koko would have lived as a wild gorilla. Koko certainly won the hearts and minds of many when she adopted, and named, a pet kitten and grieved that animal’s untimely death.
I never met Koko, but she had a significant impact on my thinking from the time her photograph, which she took herself – perhaps one of the world’s first “selfies”, – appeared on the cover of National Geographic Magazine in 1978. I was in my mid-30s and was in the process of reassessing my own views on animal cognition.
I should explain that I’ve long objected to the frequent apparent need by so many members of the animal protection community to regard animals as being “just like us,” and to continually look for human traits and characteristics among animals. I’ve been even more critical of the counter-view, then (and often still) popular within scientific communities, that animals are essentially instinctive creatures with automatic response to stimuli, not to be confused with cognition. To them “anthropomorphism” is a grievous sin against reality that results from our own cognitive limitations.
The book, Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer, had just come out (1975), providing much carefully argued support for my own increasing belief that most animals – certainly mammals and birds – differed from us more in degree than kind, and that the major moral issue was their ability to suffer fear and pain. My own plaint against Singer and other so-called “animal rights” philosophers was that the ability to suffer seemed to displace all other concerns, such as the ecological role of the species, or of the individual in contributing to species survival.
Since then, there has been a plethora of peer-reviewed scientific papers and popular accounts of animals showing what Koko began to teach us – that animals can think, can reason, and are deserving of compassion and respect.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry