While still in high school I developed an interest in reading about the big game hunters of Africa. I found the motion pictures produced by “bring ‘em back alive” Frank Buck, Clyde Beatty, Carl Akley (he killed a leopard with his bare hands), and Martin and Osa Johnson fascinating.
Ernest Hemingway’s stories of the daring white hunters of Africa inspired me to hope that someday I might roam the Serengeti in search of elephants and lions, hunt among the Mountains of the Moon and descend into Oringorogoro a trusty Manlicher rifle in the hands of my faithful gunbearer. And perhaps in the misty forests of Uganda encounter that most fearsome of quarry, the gorilla!
Such were the romantic dreams of youth in those days, when high adventure in distant, exotic places seemed the supreme adventure and fulfillment of manhood.
That was long before I read the Year of the Gorilla by George Shaller. Upon reading this book I was amazed and a bit chagrined to learn that armed only with binoculars, pencil and notebook, Shaller stalked, observed and communed with the great silverbacks of the African highlands.
What kind of heresy was this?
Shaller’s work opened the door to further studies of apes and chimpanzees by Jane Goodall, Dain Fossey and others. We learned that Chimpanzees used tools.
In time, some gorillas and chimps appear to have been taught to communicate with their hominoid mentors. But there is always the doubt that this proves only that apes can mimic humans in the same way that parrots produce words and phrases.
Yet a nagging question became evident: By whose definition could “being human” now be decided? Certainly apes are not human even though they might display humanoid behavior?
This brings to mind another book.
On a hot Mississippi afternoon I fished a discarded paperback novel out of a barracks trash can. It had an intriguing premise. Some explorers found a valley in New Guiney inhabited by what they judged to be a new species of apes. But were they apes? Might they not be a very primitive species of hominids?
These “apemen” seemed intelligent enough to be used as laborers of a kind, for their strength was greater than a man’s. Yet, how could one decide if they were simply beasts of burden or a kind of sub-human slave?
The debate over the future of these creatures raged on until a wise man asked what was the defining criteria of man’s human nature? Why, he said, man had a concept of a metaphysical authority greater than his own, he recognized God’s presence in his creation. Did the apemen recognize a supernatural power beyond their understanding? If so, they must be admitted to the human race.
When a young boy accidentally fell into a zoo exhibit area inhabited by gorillas several years ago, it was a large silvberback male who appeared to warn off the other gorillas. He sat motionless near the boy, touching him once with a finger as if to reassure himself that what he was seeing was actually there. The boy, unmolested by the gorillas survived. Then, more recently, another boy tumbled into a gorilla habitat. This time a female gorilla named Binti Jua carried the boy to a safe place where he could be rescued by paramedics. Her action has been credited to a maternal instinct. The fact that she had been raised in close contact with humans is seen as another factor in what some call extraordinary behavior for a primate.
Gorillas are not domesticated animlas regardless of how they are raised. Unlike dogs, cats or cattle, gorillas have not developed a synergistic relationship with us. They are not bound by loyalty to favor us with compassion. So why should they have any feelings of compassion or sympathy for a man-child whose life was in jepordy?
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