Gorillas: Nothing Like King Kong!

These gentle giants deserve better from us

Many 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.