Fabuous photos Doc. Just beautiful. I agree with you and Zoom about all that. It's a real situation humans have created. But I'm glad you got this experience. And it sounds very cool what you will be doing in the future. Maybe you'll have a bigger calling than you imagined. No better person for the job. Thanks for sharing all those pictures....so nice. Gorillas have always been my favorites. They might not be as sad as they look. I don't know. It may be just a look they have and our projection of what we think they should be doing. They're very intelligent, but our intelligence is much greater and we may be perceiving things differently. They may be quite content when they're given a lovely, large and natural type habitat....especially the ones born here.
You'll have to see the gorilla clicker training videos Carrie. There is a portion where Kakinga is being asked to present his shoulder for a needle (fairly blunt and just pressed lightly on his shoulder) and you can see that he's a bit worried about it.
He tries to offer the back of his wrist instead several times just so he can see how it will feel first. Very child like, sweet and surprisingly vulnerable.
He has a few little temper tantrums when Garth won't go along with the wrist idea, nothing major just an obvious disappointed huff.
He eventually does offer his shoulder and looks very pleased with himself for such an act of bravery.
Garth, his keeper, was going a bit quickly and while he was very kind and gentle, you could see where slowing things down would have been a benefit. Garth was concerned about that as well and was really interested in formal clicker information and ideas. The group of trainers that I met have only been clicker training, many self taught, for less than 10 years.
They've made amazing progress with all of the animals that I met. Unfortunately, they're pretty poor quality because they were taken indoors.