Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (33 page)

As I took her almost weightless body in my hand and carried it out to the meadow, I felt a genuine sadness. She had given me much. She had stirred my imagination and opened a window on a Lilliputian world. Beyond that, there had been moments when I felt contact between her tiny being and my own. Sometimes when I touched her lovingly and she nibbled my fingers in return, it felt as though an affectionate message was passing between us.

I put Mousie’s body down in the grass and walked back to the house. I was sad, not for Mousie, but for me. The size of a friend has nothing to do with the void he or she leaves behind. I knew I would miss my littlest pet.

Faith McNulty

The Cat and the Grizzly

C
ats seem to go on the principle that it never
does any harm to ask for what you want.

Joseph Wood Kruth

“Another box of kittens dumped over the fence, Dave,” one of our volunteers greeted me one summer morning. I groaned inside. As the founder of Wildlife Images Rehabilitation Center, I had more than enough to do to keep up with the wild animals in our care. But somehow, local people who didn’t have the heart to take their unwanted kittens to the pound often dumped them over our fence. They knew we’d try to live-trap them, spay or neuter them, and place them through our network of approximately 100 volunteers.

That day’s brood contained four kittens. We managed to trap three of them, but somehow one little rascal got away. In twenty-four acres of park, there wasn’t much we could do once the kitten disappeared—and many other animals required our attention. It wasn’t long before I forgot completely about the lost kitten as I went about my daily routine.

A week or so later, I was spending time with one of my favorite “guests”—a giant grizzly bear named Griz.

This grizzly bear had come to us as an orphaned cub six years ago, after being struck by a train in Montana. He’d been rescued by a Blackfoot Indian, had lain unconscious for six days in a Montana hospital’s intensive care unit, and ended up with neurological damage and a blind right eye. As he recovered, it was clear he was too habituated to humans and too mentally impaired to go back to the wild, so he came to live with us as a permanent resident.

Grizzly bears are not generally social creatures. Except for when they mate or raise cubs, they’re loners. But this grizzly liked people. I enjoyed spending time with Griz, giving him personal attention on a regular basis. Even this required care, since a 560-pound creature could do a lot of damage to a human unintentionally.

That July afternoon, I approached his cage for our daily visit. He’d just been served his normal meal—a mix of vegetables, fruit, dog kibble, fish and chicken. Griz was lying down with the bucket between his forepaws, eating, when I noticed a little spot of orange coming out of the blackberry brambles inside the grizzly’s pen.

It was the missing kitten. Now probably six weeks old, it couldn’t have weighed more than ten ounces at most. Normally, I would have been concerned that the poor little thing was going to starve to death. But this kitten had taken a serious wrong turn and might not even last that long.

What should I do?
I was afraid that if I ran into the pen to try to rescue it, the kitten would panic and run straight for Griz. So I just stood back and watched, praying that it wouldn’t get too close to the huge grizzly.

But it did. The tiny kitten approached the enormous bear and let out a purr and a mew. I winced. With any normal bear, that cat would be dessert.

Griz looked over at him. I cringed as I watched him raise his forepaw toward the cat and braced myself for the fatal blow.

But Griz stuck his paw into his food pail, where he grabbed a piece of chicken out of the bucket and threw it toward the starving kitten.

The little cat pounced on it and carried it quickly into the bushes to eat.

I breathed a sigh of relief. That cat was one lucky animal! He’d approached the one bear of the sixteen we housed that would tolerate him—and the one in a million who’d share lunch.

A couple of weeks later, I saw the cat feeding with Griz again. This time, he rubbed and purred against the bear, and Griz reached down and picked him up by the scruff of his neck. After that, the friendship blossomed. We named the kitten Cat.

These days, Cat eats with Griz all the time. He rubs up against the bear, bats him on the nose, ambushes him, even sleeps with him. And although Griz is a gentle bear, a bear’s gentleness is not all that gentle. Once Griz accidentally stepped on Cat. He looked horrified when he realized what he’d done. And sometimes when Griz tries to pick up Cat by the scruff of the cat’s neck, he winds up grabbing Cat’s whole head. But Cat doesn’t seem to mind.

Their love for each other is so pure and simple; it goes beyond size and species. Both animals have managed to successfully survive their rough beginnings. But even more than that, they each seem so happy to have found a friend.

Dave Siddon
Founder, Wildlife Images Rehabilitation Center
As told to Jane Martin

Fine Animal Gorilla

Those of us who study apes have always known that gorillas are highly intelligent and communicate with each other through gestures. I had always dreamed of learning to communicate with gorillas. When I heard about a project in which other scientists tried to teach a chimpanzee American Sign Language (ASL), I was intrigued and excited. I thought ASL might be the perfect way to talk to gorillas because it used hand gestures to communicate whole words and ideas. As a graduate student at Stanford University, I decided to try that same experiment with a gorilla. All I had to do was find the right gorilla.

In 1971, on the fourth of July, a gorilla was born at the San Francisco Zoo. She was named Hanabi-Ko, a Japanese word meaning “fireworks child,” but everyone called her Koko. She was three months old when I first saw her, a tiny gorilla clinging to her mother’s back.

Soon after that, an illness spread through the entire gorilla colony. Koko almost died, but she was nursed back to health by doctors and staff at the zoo. Her mother was unable to care for her, and even though Koko was healthy again, she wasn’t old enough to live among older gorillas. It seemed the perfect solution that I begin my work with her.

I started visiting Koko at the zoo every day. At first, the baby gorilla clearly didn’t like me. She ignored me or bit me when I tried to pick her up. Then slowly, because I never failed to come see her every day, Koko began to trust me.

The first words I attempted to teach Koko in sign language were “drink,” “food” and “more.” I asked the zoo assistants who helped in the nursery to form the sign for “food” with their hands whenever they gave Koko anything to eat. I signed “drink” each time I gave Koko her bottle and formed her small hand into the sign for “drink,” too.

One morning, about a month after I began working with Koko, I was slicing fruit for her snack and Koko was watching me.

“Food,” she signed.

I was too surprised to respond.

“Food,” she clearly signed again.

I wanted to jump for joy. Koko could sense I was happy with her. Excited, she grabbed a bucket, plunked it over her head and ran wildly around the playroom.

By age two, Koko’s signs were more than just simple, one-word requests. She was learning signs quickly and stringing them together.

“There mouth, mouth—you there,” Koko signed when she wanted me to blow fog on the nursery window to draw in with our fingers. And “Pour that hurry drink hurry,” when she was thirsty.

The next year, Koko moved into a specially remodeled trailer on the Stanford University campus, where I could be with her more of the time and she could concentrate on her language lessons with fewer distractions.

We had a big birthday party for Koko when she turned three. She carefully ate almost all of her birthday cake with a spoon. But when it came time for the last bite, the little gorilla couldn’t resist. She scooped the cake up with her hand and stuffed it into her mouth.

“More eat,” she signed.

By the age of five, Koko knew more than 200 words in ASL. I recorded every sign that she used and even videotaped her actions so I could study her use of sign language later. The more signs Koko learned, the more she showed me her personality. She argued with me, displayed a very definite sense of humor and expressed strong opinions. She even used sign language to tell lies.

Once I caught her poking the window screen of her trailer with a chopstick.

“What are you doing?” I signed to her.

Koko quickly put the stick in her mouth like a cigarette. “Mouth smoke,” she answered. Another time I caught her chewing a crayon when she was supposed to be drawing a picture.

“You’re not eating that, are you?” I asked her.

“Lip,” Koko signed, and she quickly took the crayon out of her mouth and moved it across her lips, as if putting on lipstick. I was so amazed, I almost forgot to reprimand her.

Like any naughty child, when Koko behaved badly, she was sent to a corner in her trailer. She was quite aware that she had misbehaved: “Stubborn devil,” she would sign to herself. If it was only for a small thing, she would excuse herself after a little while in the corner. But if she felt she had been very bad, she soon turned around to get my attention. Then she would sign, “Sorry. Need hug.”

I decided to find a companion for Koko and so Michael, a three-year-oldmale gorilla, came to live with us. I wanted to teach him sign language and I also hoped that one day, Koko and Michael would mate. Would they teach their baby ASL? It was a question I was eager to have answered.

Michael was a good student. He often concentrated even longer on his lessons than Koko did. At first, Koko was very jealous of her new playmate. She called Michael names and blamed him for things he hadn’t done. They squabbled like a couple of typical human toddlers.

“Stupid toilet,” she signed, when asked about Michael.

“Stink bad squash gorilla,” Michael answered back.

Koko loved to see Michael get scolded, especially when it was for doing something that Koko had encouraged him to do. She would listen to me telling Michael to be a good gorilla, and a deep breathy sound would come out of her—it was the sound of a gorilla laughing.

But they loved to play together and spent a lot of time wrestling, tickling and signing to each other.

If you asked Koko what her favorite animal was, she would invariably sign “gorilla.” But she also loved cats. Her two favorite books were
Puss in Boots
and
The Three
Little Kittens
. Still, nothing prepared me for the way Koko reacted when a small, gray, tailless kitten came to live with us.

When asked what presents she wanted for her birthday or Christmas, Koko always asked for a cat. When she was twelve, we brought her three kittens to choose from and she picked the one kitten who didn’t have a tail. The very first time she picked up the little kitten, she tried to tuck him in the crease of her thigh, and then on the back of her neck, two of the places mother gorillas carry their babies. She called him her “baby” and picked the name “All Ball.” Without a tail, the kitten did look like a ball.

All Ball was the first kitten Koko had, but he was not her first pet; she had played with a rabbit and a bird among other small animals.

“Koko love Ball. Soft good cat cat,” she signed.

Then one morning All Ball was hit and instantly killed by a car. I had to tell Koko what happened. At first Koko acted as if she didn’t hear me, but when I left the trailer I heard her cry. It was her distress call—a loud, long series of high-pitched hoots. I cried too. Three days later, she told me how she felt.

“Cry, sad, frown,” Koko signed.

“What happened to All Ball?” I asked her.

“Blind, sleep cat,” she answered. She had seemed to have grasped the concept of death.

Koko finally chose another kitten, a soft gray one.

“Have you thought of a name yet?” I asked her.

“That smoke. Smoke smoke,” she answered.

The kitten was a smoky gray, so we named her Smoky.

Many days when Koko has her reading lessons, she sees the written word for cat and then forms the sign for that word. We can’t show her too many pictures of cats, though. She still gets sad when she sees any cat that looks at all like All Ball, her adored first kitten.

My language project with Koko, which I began in 1972, has become my life’s work. Over the years, I have watched Koko grow up. As a scientist, I have documented every phase of her development. As a “parent,” I have cared about and for her and have been proud of her every accomplishment. Koko has surprised, enlightened and inspired me. Although raised by humans and now part of a family of humans and gorillas, Koko has no illusions that she is a human. When asked who she is, she always signs, “Fine animal gorilla.”

Francine (Penny) Patterson, Ph.D.

7
SAYING
GOOD-BYE

. . . love knows not its own depth
until the hour of separation.

Kahlil Gibran