Mother Gorilla Mourns Her Son
Airdate
:
8/19/2008
A gorilla cradles her baby, holding him lovingly and gently caressing his head.
The video of the gorilla mother and child broke hearts around the world. What you can't immediately tell from the watching the moving video is that the baby is dead.
The video was shot at a zoo in Germany, where 11-year old Gana lived with her three-month-old baby Claudio.
The grieving process for a gorilla is very human. When Claudio died, apparently of a heart defect, Gana could not let go.
In the video you can see Gana trying to comfort and wake her dead baby, unable to comprehend that he was gone.
She holds her child close to her face, kisses him, then cradles him once more. The video proves that when it comes to raw emotion humans are not that different from our primate cousins.
"I think that the bond you see between gorillas and their infants is very similar to what you would see between a human mother and her infant," says Dr. Kristen Lukas of the Cleveland Municipal Zoo.
The same maternal instinct was evident in the now-legendary footage shot at a British zoo. A five-year-old boy lay unconscious after falling into a gorilla pit.
The crowd could only watch in horror as a male gorilla approached the boy. Incredibly, the curious gorilla protected the child, gently stroking him as he kept his own family at arms length.
The wounded boy awoke and was taken away by rescuers. But sadly, the story of little Claudio did not have a happy ending.
"Everything we know about the way gorilla moms behave tells us that yes, this is a significant loss for them," says Dr. Lukas.
