She was later moved to Stanford, and soon thereafter Patterson and collaborator Ronald Cohn founded The Gorilla Foundation. Researcher Francine Patterson began working with Koko in 1972, teaching her sign language. Watch Koko the Gorilla Use Sign Language in This 1981 Film Pushing the Boundariesīorn July 4, 1971, Koko was born Hanabi-ko, Japanese for "fireworks child,” at the San Francisco Zoo. “Even as we celebrate her life, we must remember that Koko was made to live in confinement in a highly unnatural way from her infancy through her death.” “Equally importantly, though, she raised our awareness of the costs to animal individuals of our scientific curiosity about other sentient lives,” says King, author of How Animals Grieve. “Because she was smart enough to comprehend and use aspects of our language, Koko could show us what all great apes are capable of: reasoning about their world, and loving and grieving the other beings to whom they become attached,” Barbara King, a professor emerita of anthropology at the College of William and Mary, says by email. Koko became the most visible member of her species, the western lowland gorilla ( Gorilla gorilla gorilla), which is considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. She also appeared a second time on the cover in January 1985, in a story about Koko and her pet kitten. National Geographic magazine featured Koko of its cover twice: First in October 1978, with a photograph that she took of herself in a mirror (perhaps making it one of the earliest prominent animal selfies). She became an international celebrity during the course of her life, with a vocabulary of more than 1,000 signs and the ability to understand 2,000 words of spoken English, according to The Gorilla Foundation. Koko, the western lowland gorilla that died in her sleep Tuesday at age 46, was renowned for her emotional depth and ability to communicate in sign language.
0 kommentar(er)
