Koko the Gorilla Wasn ’t Human, But She Taught Us So Much About Ourselves

Koko the gorilla earned her pronouns a long, long time ago. It is one of humanity’s great vanities that we withhold pronouns from most animals — or at least we withhold the good ones. Homo sapiens get the dignity of a “he” or a “she.” We fob off other species with an “it.” We speak of the woman who walked down the street, and the dog that accompanied her. It was never that way with Koko, the celebrated western lowland gorilla who died peacefully in her sleep on June 19, at age 46 — a bit longer than the 30 to 40 years her species typically lives in the wild. From the time she was born, on July 4, 1971, the people who knew Koko and cared for her made sure she was a she. And when the rest of us spoke about her in the years that followed, the very nature of the things we said demanded that we show her the same linguistic respect. It was the rare person who would think of describing Koko as “the gorilla that understands 2,000 words and can sign 1,000 of them.” Those accomplishments fairly demand a who. Koko first came to most people’s attention forty years ago, when she appeared on the cover of National Geographic, taking her own picture in a mirror, and we fell for her talents and her cross-species charm straightaway. When she was a year old, Koko began working with Francine “Penny” Patterson, then a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at Stanford University, who had long believed th...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized animals onetime Source Type: news