DailySusan Humor Blog

GORILLA BABY

Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently,
lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen,
and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life:
but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons. . . .
-- Deuteronomy 4:9

We went to the zoo last weekend. The inhabitants display amusing expressions and gestures that remind me of my relatives.

In the gorilla hangout, we saw a human inside the glass enclosure, cuddling and playing with an adorable baby gorilla in a tiny diaper. Relatives, all right – on my husband’s side.

The zookeeper was sitting on an easy chair looking normal and domestic, except the baby on his lap hanging playfully from his outstretched arms was a pointy-headed furtop with hairy armpits.

Behind them, leaning casually up against the glass, was a grown gorilla. I figured she was the mama, and the zookeeper was just acclimating the baby gorilla to human handling. After a few minutes of zoological nannying, I thought he’d give the baby back to her, like the 5:30 p.m. handoff at day-care centers coast to coast.

Then a friend set me straight. Actually, that fascinating little scene has the makings of a horror show, with chilling parallels for us humans.

See, the friend had been there the week before, and talked to the zookeeper. It seems the gorilla mama, Timu, the world’s first test-tube gorilla, had been rejected by her mother. She never got gorilla-style nurturing and love. She had been raised in the zoo nursery, and though the humans tried to simulate gorilla mothering as much as they could, it was tough.

After all that human interaction, when they tried to introduce Timu into the gorilla social group, they rejected her, too. Now she was not only rejected, but socially isolated. But gorilla breeding is important, so they wanted her to reproduce.

Timu did not bond with her first baby, Bambio. According to the zoo’s news archives, she was gentle and protective at first, carrying her five-pound baby in her hands. But she never did put her up to her chest for a hug. She kept losing interest altogether and laying her down on the floor. The baby’s body temperature got so low that zookeepers had no choice but to take her to the nursery and hand-raise her from there, like her mother before her.

Bottom line: nurturing is only partly instinctive. A lot of it is learned, by observation. You can’t give what you never got.

So when it happened again, with this baby, born April 8, the zookeepers took the baby away again, and are trying to model good mothering – holding, feeding, cuddling and playing with the baby in the demonstration booth -- hoping that Timu will learn from observation, and do better next time.

My friend saw the lesson for homo sapiens, with our addictions, our TV watching, our cohabitation, our full-time day care and our broken homes. Who pays? Children.

She wrote: “Imagine: ‘mothering’ is only one generation away from extinction. Loving and persevering in parenting (and marriage) should be imprinted – learned by living it. Is it any wonder young marriages are crumbling at such a rapid pace? How many young people are going at it without the pattern of having lived in it while growing up?”

She’s right. We have to stop monkeying around with motherhood. We have to do everything we can to support it, in our families and in our nation.

But boy, am I glad that I’m not, at the present time, lactating. That’s because, in researching for this story, I read that in another gorilla “baby neglect” case. The zookeepers found a young human mother who was breastfeeding, and had her sit outside the gorilla cage and demonstrate how it’s done for the wide-eyed spectator gorillas.

Now, that’s going all out – literally.

With my luck, if my dairies were currently in operation, I’d be getting a call any day now. Because I love animals so much, I doubt I could say no.

Hey! Let’s be for motherhood . . . but let’s not go ape.

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Prayer Request: I’m getting ready to launch my new education website this coming Thursday. GoBigEd.com is intended to inform Nebraska parents and taxpayers about K-12 education issues and possible solutions so that we can help educators in this most important of tasks. I ask for prayers that Christian principles such as honesty, kindness, peacemaking and thrift will prevail in our public institutions such as schools. I pray that my efforts, as limited as they are, will be used by God to draw adults together to unite around children, and to make a positive difference for constructive change in my beloved home state. This one’s for you, Lord Jesus – You love us and our children the most. (Matthew 19:14)