Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks to People, review: A birthday party for an ape, complete with balloons...really?

Sean O'Grady agrees with the idea of animal rights but isn't convinced by our relentless fascination with gorillas

(BBC)

Gorillas seem to hold a particular fascination for us, so much so that sometimes we imagine – and that is the only word for it – that they are communicating with us, that is to say in a more “human” way than is in fact the reality.

As we saw recently with the child who fell into the gorilla enclosure at Cincinnati zoo, and the subsequent row about whether they should have killed Harambe, gorillas are indeed what conservationists call “charismatic” creatures. Think also of King Kong, those brutish martial horse-riding ones like Urko in Planet of the Apes, David Attenborough’s “special moment”, Gorillas in The Mist, Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue... the list goes on.

Which brings me to Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks to People, a BBC1 documentary that told us the story of human Penny Patterson and her primate friend Koko, with whom, we were led to understand, she could communicate through sign language. For some 44 years since Ms Patterson met baby Koko at San Francisco zoo, this experiment has been progressing.

Now, of course animals communicate with us all the time. Your dog will let you know when he wants to nip out to take care of personal affairs, and a tame parrot will make friendly noises, and mimic human speech in return for cuttlefish, a simple enough transaction. Cats I’m not so sure about – more inscrutable, really – but they most assuredly cannot “know what we’re thinking” as is often remarked.

I don’t want to be unkind to pioneering science or people’s bond with their companion animals, but a birthday party for an ape, complete with balloons, cakes and presents? Really? Does western lowland gorilla Koko realise the significance of being born on 4 July? I hope I don’t have to answer that.

I think I have seen similar exercises with chimps, maybe gorillas, on TV before, and they do raise legitimate questions, not least about the nature of language. But the fact that an ape can learn to put their hands into a certain configuration in order to win some reward is not, to my mind, the equivalent of language or “understanding”, nor dioes it constitutes a conversation. It is like a dog barking twice to get a Bonio: it doesn’t mean they have mathematical ability or can, in fact, “count” or have their own word for rusk. So it depends on what you mean by “understanding things”. I admit that Koko doing the sign for the abstract “good” was impressive, but just because Koko has a face and hands to express things like us doesn’t mean that she is so much brainier, or “more human” than a poodle, say. I have seen dogs able to memorise a number of words and go and retrieve objects such as “doll” on command. Again, it doesn’t mean they know what a doll is.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a member of animal welfare organisations, I agree with the idea of animal rights, and I think the world needs to spend far more on protecting all manner of endangered species – the really stupid and ugly ones as well as the brainier, prettier ones. All fine. Koko was a nice, gentle, intelligent animal. Animals have rights, if not legal then moral, and quite right too. Yet I cannot countenance the idea that these creatures are just bursting to tell us stuff or vote in the EU referendum if only we could speak to them, Dr Dolittle-style, or that “some sort of bridge has been crossed” as Ms Patterson puts it. That, I’m afraid, is a load of monkey nuts.

The big question in the show was whether Koko should have been living with humans all her life, and not, as the zoo wished, to hang out with other gorillas, do a bit of breeding, that sort of thing. As Penny admitted, “the maternal instincts” cut in: big mistake, even though her campaign to keep Koko succeeded. Sadly, Koko is actually not able to tell us what she thought of that. Koko is no longer a gorilla, in the sense that she thinks Ms Patterson is her mum and doesn’t know how to relate to her own species. Can’t be right.

At any rate, no gorilla has ever been able to match the hilarious Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch in which an explorer (Mel Smith) was interviewed alongside Gerald (Rowan Atkinson), the gorilla he captured, with Pamela Stephenson as the presenter.

Script as follows:

Interviewer: Professor, can Gerald really speak as we would understand it?

Prof. Timothy Fielding: Oh yes, yes. He can speak a few actual words. Of course it was extremely difficult to get him even to this stage. When I first captured Gerald in the Congo, '67 I think it was...

Gerald, the Gorilla: '68

Prof. Timothy Fielding: '68. Umm... there was an awful lot of work to do. He was enormously slow and difficult. I had to do a lot of work with him on a sort of one-to-one basis...

Gerald, the Gorilla: [interrupting] Yes, yes, if I might just butt at this point Tim, I think I should point out that I have done a considerable amount of work on this project myself and if I may say so your teaching methods do leave a bit to be desired...

Prof. Timothy Fielding: That's a bit ungrateful, isn't it?

Gerald, the Gorilla: ...and your diction for instance...

Prof. Timothy Fielding: I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Can I put this into some sort of perspective? When I caught Gerald in '68 he was completely wild.

Gerald, the Gorilla: Wild? I was absolutely livid!

Koko didn’t seem too livid last night, though. Bored, if anything.