
Once, when Collin and I were dude and lady, he brought a very special movie to my house just for me. Few men would be thoughtful and bizarre enough to select this movie with their special lady in mind, and that's probably why I was so nuts about Cocopants. The movie? Koko: The Talking Gorilla.
That's right. Collin seduced me with a documentary about primates, and it was HOT, I tell you.
Anyhooter, I mention this now because I've been consumed with monkey thoughts ever since the Travis-the-Chimp incident, and because Koko and her kitten (who was not featured in the film, much to my disappointment) have come up frequently in conversations of late. (Am I the only one who's been talking a lot about overprivileged monkeys during the past few months?)
Those of you who did not regularly purchase books from the Troll Book Club in elementary school need to know that Koko was a gorilla who learned sign language, but was unable (and perhaps unwilling) to learn how to mate successfully, which meant that she had no gorillababies, which prompted her to ask for a kitten, which prompted many smart photographers to take pictures of her and her catbaby and put them on posters to sell to children through school book clubs, and which may have inspired more than one of those children to become quite agitated when her mother refused to give birth to kittens instead of human children, and may also have inspired that same child to make a promise to herself that she would only ever have kittens for babies, which now looks like a painfully likely fate for the aforementioned poster-buying child.
I recently had a disagreement with my friend, Mark, about whether or not Koko was responsible for the death of her first kitten (who, Mark informed me, was named "All Ball" because she had no tail; get it? she was all round, all ball... a detail I was jealous that I had not remembered, and which seemed to make Mark a more credible source of information about Koko and her kitten).
In my mind, the truth was that Koko had accidentally manhandled the kitten, killed it, and was immediately given a replacement, so that more pictures could be taken, more posters could be made, more children could doom themselves to childlessness, etc. I had this idea (blame my fascination with tabloids) that Koko's handlers attempted to keep All Ball's fate from the public, but that the awful truth was later leaked somehow.
Mark thought I was nuts and that I'd made the whole thing up.
The debate was obviously of the utmost importance, so I used my highly developed investigative skillz to find out the truth. On the Google. And then on the Wikipedia. And then on the Yahoo.
This is what I discovered:
Koko proved a wonderful pet owner and mother. She was very gentle with the kitten and treated him much like a baby gorilla, carrying him on her back and trying to nurse him. When she was in a playful mood, she would dress All Ball up in napkins or sign to him suggesting that they tickle each other, her favorite game.
Unfortunately, their relationship ended abrubtly in December of 1984, when All Ball escaped from the gorilla cage and was killed by a car.
...All Ball was followed by two other kittens, Lipstick and Smoky, and a number of other pets.
--http://ask.yahoo.com/20000905.html
I thought you'd like to know this. It clears Koko's name and makes me feel a lot better about my own potential as a kitten-mother.
Post-script for the perverse:
On the Wikipedia, I discovered something very disturbing about Koko. I won't lower my extremely high blogging standards for truth and morality by re-typing the allegations here, but if you want to know more about Koko's bizarre affinity for motherly things, click here and read the "Sexual Harrassment" section. She's no Travis, but she's still a little creepy.
