Ever wondered what it would be like to talk to animals?
What would they say?
Well Koko the Gorilla might be able to tell us.
Hey guys julia here for DNews
Making the rounds on the internet lately has been a viral video of a gorilla with a message.
Koko the gorilla signs saying she loves man and loves nature but “man is stupid” she
says to “fix nature”.
While heartfelt, it seems…
a little scripted.
I mean, her teacher even admitted to giving her a script.
But who is this Koko, anyway?
Koko is probably the world’s most famous gorilla.
She’s a western lowland gorilla who rose to fame in the 1980s with her amazing ability
to speak using American sign language...and for her love of kittens.
Since then she’s become a celebrity and icon for gorilla conservation.
She was born at the San Francisco Zoo on July 4th, 1971.
She’s been working with teacher Dr. Penny Patterson, then a doctoral student in developmental
psychology at Stanford university, since she was just a year old.
Within two weeks of working together Koko had learned the signs for eat and drink.
Since then Koko has spent over 30 years living in the hills near Santa Cruz as part of the
Gorilla Foundation, started by Dr. Patterson.
She now uses over 1100 signs and even combines them to make up her own words.
For example, she signed “finger bracelet” to describe a ring.
But, back to the viral video.
In spite of what she’s signing, Koko probably doesn’t understand climate change.
Frans de Waal, director of Emory University's Living Links primate research center, told
the Huffington Post that "Koko's human-coached message goes well beyond anything that a gorilla
understands or cares about.”
While she may not know much about climate change, Koko does know a lot about language.Gestures
are something gorillas do naturally, according to one study published in the journal Animal
Cognition.
And the researchers note that the way apes use this kind of “language” reflects some
understanding of the audience.
For example, if an ape makes a series of gestures and its “audience,” (other apes), understand
it, that ape will continue to make the same gestures.
If the other ape conveys confusion, the first ape will try other gestures.
This suggests that apes might have some sort of theory of mind, or the understanding that
others might have different intentions, desires, or thoughts.
It sounds simple, but only a few animals on this planet can do it.
So maybe gorillas li Koko have some sense of what's going on in other’s minds.
But surprisingly most apes fail another test of animal cognition, the mirror test.
This tests how self-aware animals are by seeing whether they recognize themselves in a mirror.
Gorillas, while supposedly highly intelligent, fail the mirror test.
Now, this might not be due to lack of intelligence - eye contact in the gorilla world is seen
as an act of aggression.
Either way, Koko, who has been raised mostly with her teacher and around humans who make
eye contact, passes the mirror test...she even uses a mirror as a tool to groom herself.
She even seems to experience grief and memory.
After the loss of her beloved kitten “All Ball”, she signed the words “bad, sad,
bad” and “frown, cry, frown”.
It’s a loss she still refers to decades later.
She made headlines yet again when she heard of the passing of Robin Williams, who she
once met.
According to a spokeswoman for the Gorilla foundation, “Koko became very somber, with
her head bowed and her lip quivering.”
She signed “woman” and “crying.”
While she may or may not have remembered meeting him, it seems she at least was picking up
on her teacher’s sadness.
So, in the end, that viral video might be a little staged...but come on, what viral
video these days isn’t?
Koko has been a great icon for animal conservation.
And she’s permanently changed the way we understand animal intelligence.
Her abilities have opened the door to true cross-species communication.
That’s something you can’t fake.
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If you could communicate to an animal, which would it be?