Most people have two persistent images that they bring to
mind when gorillas are mentioned. One is the fierce monster swatting planes at
the top of the Empire State Building in the 1933 film King Kong; the other is
the British naturalist David Attenborough being received hospitably by a family
of gorillas in the Rwandan rain forest in his “Life on Earth” series broadcast
in 1979.
So which image is closer to the truth? It should come as no
surprise to learn that 1970s reality beats 1930s Hollywood every time! The
gorilla’s reputation for ferocity is based on very shaky evidence.
The name “gorilla” goes back as far as 480 BC when a
Carthaginian named Hanno used it for a human tribe that were noticeably hairy. It
was applied to the animal only after 1847 when Thomas Savage, an American
missionary working in West Africa, acquired a gorilla skull and heard stories
about huge apes from local people. According to them, the skull would have
belonged to “a monkey-like animal, remarkable for its size, ferocity and habits”.
It would appear that he was treated to some fearsome stories about these
creatures, which he had no reason to disbelieve although he never set eyes on a
live gorilla himself.
Thus, when Thomas Savage took his gorilla skull back home
and the newspapers got to hear about it, popular imagination was fired about
the fierce creatures that terrorised the African jungle and were mercifully
absent from the fauna of the United States. It was stories about African
gorillas – read in childhood – that inspired the film producer Merian C Cooper
to create a monster that he named “King Kong” and which only reinforced the
public perception of what gorillas were like.
However, real gorillas are very different from King Kong!
They are vegetarians that live on a diet of green plants and bark. They have
huge stomachs to house the large intestinal tract needed to digest the enormous
amounts of food that they need to eat each day, given that jungle grass is not
particularly nutritious, and their large heads contain the powerful jaw muscles
with which they have to chew their food for many hours every day.
That said, the food is plentiful and gorillas do not need to
be in competition with each other for food supplies. A male “silverback”
maintains a harem of females who occupy a relatively small territory in which
they spend most of their time eating and sleeping.
It is, however, true that male gorillas will challenge each
other when it comes to controlling harems of females. When a young male seeks
to become “alpha” there will be a lot of posturing and noise from roaring and
chest-drumming. However, there is usually little or any fighting, because the
male who shouts louder and is physically larger will nearly always win the day
by intimidation alone.
A visiting human is far more likely to be in danger if he or
she is seen by a female gorilla to be a threat to her young, and that is true
of most wild mammals.
Gorillas are gentle giants that deserve to be left in peace.
© John Welford
