Another Gorilla dies, others are sick

Jenny, a 55 year old gorilla has died at Dallas Zoo in early September. She was an old gorilla, and died of a stomach tumor (actually she was euthanized because the tumor was inoperable).  In the wild gorillas don’t live much beyond 30 so Jenny had along life, yet it still feels sad and this story is getting wide coverage. It is the second death of a gorilla at the Dallas Zoo in a month.

Jenny who has her own Wikipedia page is a western lowland gorilla and was born in the wild and was acquired by the zoo in 1957. She gave birth in 1965 to a female named Vicki but never conceived again. Vicki was sent to a Canadian zoo at age 5. There are four other gorillas at Dallas Zoo.

Just last month, another gorilla at the zoo, 43-year-old Hercules, died after undergoing a medical procedure for spinal disease and in 2004, Dallas police shot and killed a 13-year-old gorilla named Jabari at the zoo after it jumped over a wall, bit three people and snatched up a toddler by his teeth. The enclosure was remodeled and the city paid a fine to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Should Gorillas and other apes be in zoos?

There are about 360 gorillas in North American zoos. I love zoos and think that they play an important role in education and awareness, but somehow it seems wrong to keep apes in zoos. We would never imagine keeping a human in a zoo – so why do we keep our closest living relatives in them? It must be like a prison for gorillas, chimps and other intelligent animals. You just have to google gorilla images to see the deplorable conditions that most zoo apes live in, check out their expressions, and see how sad they look. Gorillas are one of the mian attractions at the Dallas Zoo which recieved  670,084 visitors last year alone. The entrance fees would have generated almost $4.7 million.  I wonder how much of this goes back into conservation, to the places where these endangered animals were taken from so many years ago?

Today we also recieved the alarming news that gorillas are the latest victims of the tainted milk scandal in China that has killed four human infants and left more than 50,000 ill. The two gorillas from Hangzhou Wildlife World in the eastern province of Zhejiang, aged one and three, had been fed with milk powder made by Sanlu Group, the company associated with the contamination scandal. Both gorillas are showing the early signs of kidney stones.