Hi friends, it’s no secret that many animals have better eyesight and sense of smell work better than ours or that they can detect things that we can’t like magnetic fields. It has long been known that some animals have amazingly developed senses for examples. Dogs have a much better sense of smell than we do, and cats can see in complete darkness when a person cannot do anything without a flashlight. Some animals can sense things that we are not even aware of, such as the ultraviolet radiation of the Earth’s magnetic field, but despite. All that we still think we’re smarter because humans can talk. They can think they can plan.
Of course, some animals are perfectly amenable to training and parents, for example, can repeat the words they hear.
But the animal performs all the commands automatically, and probably without even thinking about it. This raises the question of whether they can understand what they are doing, feeling, experiencing and transmitting their emotions. As this story shows, not only can they, but they do it perfectly well, but perhaps we just don’t understand it. And are on a completely different wave where we only want to hear what we want.
This same issue has interested American zoo psychologist Dr. Penny Patterson half a century ago. 23 year old Penny earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Illinois in 1970, after which she set a goal to devote her life to primates. And in 1971, she began what many consider to be a world changing experiment. But this story began by accident on July 4th, 1971. On the next anniversary of American independence, a female western lowland gorilla was born at the San Francisco Zoo named Hannah Biko, the child of fireworks in Japanese, or simply Coco.
It was with this baby. A year later that Francine Penny Patterson, then a graduate student at Stanford University, began her work. Her goal was simple to complete her dissertation on sign language and wild animals. She began teaching a class with a small gorilla named Coco. She taught her a modified version of the American Sign Language AM Slang. As it turned out, later it was a lifelong endeavor for both Penny and Little Coco.
After her dissertation, Patterson did not abandon her mentee, and in 1976 she founded the Gorilla Foundation.
Under its ages, the gorilla lived the rest of her life in a private sanctuary in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Woodside, CA, USA. In order for the gorilla to understand the basics of sign language, Penny had to use all the techniques that are used when working with deaf-mute people.
At first, the gorilla didn’t really want to learn, so Patterson simply showed her the object and repeated the gesture corresponding to it as many times as necessary. Some of these took weeks and months, but still, the effort paid off the first sign she successfully learned was the gesture that represented the feeling of thirst.
She lifted her index finger to her lips and flexed the rest of her fingers after the first gesture was mastered, the gorilla’s learning progressed over time and Penny was able to teach Coco the new gestures more quickly. By that time, many noticed that the girl in Coco had developed an unbreakable bond.
The baby gorilla not only did not show any aggression to Penny, but enjoyed spending time with her and when her weight and height became equal to that of an adult. But during the whole time Poco, not only did not try to do it, but even the opposite. She missed Penny when the girl was not around for various reasons and sometimes even cried. Many agree that Coco thought Penny was her mother since their bond was formed shortly after she was born.
After a while, the couple’s results became impressive. Her vocabulary was expanding like that of children her age by the age of three, hoko was unmistakably using 170 words and by the end of her life she could hear as many as 2000 English words.
But in the mid 70s the experiment had many skeptics who were convinced that the gorilla’s performance was only the result of successful training, but over time the number of skeptics diminished in view of the undeniable evidence of the guerrillas. Intelligence, for example, when Coco gestured for a banana and was given an orange, instead, she became indignant and gestured that Coco did not want an orange and asked for a banana.
Coco was also a fashionista when she went out for a walk, she was offered a yellow sweater.
A color she didn’t like for some unknown reason, after which the gorilla became indignant and gestured to Penny that she wanted a red sweater. The further penny and Coco’s relationship and learning progressed, the more the gorilla found common ground with the humans. One day in the mid 80s, Poco suddenly and unexpectedly asked for a kitten for the sake of the experiment, it was decided to give her a soft and fluffy creature. Then Penny brought three kittens and from the options she chose a Gray one. But what happened? Could not be explained.
Coco began to take care of the kitten as her own child. She cuddled him, carried him on her back, played, and protected him in every way. At that moment in life, the gorilla felt truly happy. Sadly, a year later, the kitten was gone. He ran out of his cage and ended up on a street where he was hit by a car. After that, Coco underwent a change. She was upset for a long time and didn’t want to talk or learn from anyone.
A week later, she tried to tell everyone about her. Brief when asked what happened to the kitten, she gestured.
Cats sleep at once. She saw a picture of a similar kitten, and gestured that she was sad and crying. In the early 90s, the gorillas gesture set was indeed unusually large, and our ability to communicate not only to humans but also with other animals, especially cats, amazed observers. As for the primates favorite activities, Poco was very fond of watching TV, which was in her enclosure and in the transportation van. She was especially fond of funny and hilarious TV shows, which you would constantly clap her hands in laughter while watching.
After Coco’s popularity spread around the world, sensations and people began to swirl around this large but charming ate. Some loved and protected her. It was the scientists who taught her to speak, while others disliked her and considered her a circus trick. A giant trick and constantly tried to expose the cheating. But Coco herself loved everyone because from everyone she got the main treasure in life, the treasure of human communication.
Coco was very inquisitive and very kind, despite the fact that. Gorillas are the perfect weapons created by nature only a bear could compete with it in combat effectiveness, but for the first time in all of creation, the gorilla used as a weapon, not its fangs and paws, but its brain, or rather as a tool, an instrument of knowledge of the world closer to adulthood.
Poco surprised the world. She not only learned almost 2000 gestures for human words and spoke them fluently. The furry student proved that the intelligence of animals was greatly underestimated by humans. As a result, the gorillas IQ was 95, which is quite a lot because the result of a normal person is between 90 and 110 and from 140 begins genius amazing, isn’t it? One scientist who watched chimpanzees in 1985 wrote the following apes have a language, but it differs from humans in that it cannot tell you where they are, what they saw, or what they experienced during the day to go out of the box here.
And now is precisely what high intelligence is needed Coco in her conversations, could easily go out of the box.
She recalled the past. She reflected on the future. The metaphorical nature of her language was also surprising. Not knowing what a cucumber is called, she once asked give me that green banana. But the ultimate expression of mental ACQUITY is humor.
The diligent student tried to make jokes once seeing a pigeon fly by Pogo Coquettishly called herself a good bird and declared that gorillas could fly. Too, then after thinking a little said, she was just kidding because it was fun. Once seeing an assistant wash a large lens in a bowl, she commented the eye drinks water, but that wasn’t all as it turned out. Coco knew and loved to take selfies in 1978. She took a picture of herself in the mirror and did it so well that it made the National Geographic cover.
Although the question here is whether she reached our level or mankind. With its smartphone, narcissism is gradually approaching the primates. We can tell a very long story about the beautiful cocoa because the world has never seen such an intelligent gorilla before, and in general has never seen anything like this. The experiment came to an end in 2018 when Coco died at the age of 57.
Nothing is known about the gorillas cause of death, but it is reported that she died in her sleep, quietly and peacefully.
A National Geographic correspondent once asked Coco a few years before her death. Where do gorillas go when they die? A comfortable hole? Goodbye, Coco replied with science. Shortly before her death, Coco recorded a video message to us all citizens of Earth. I am a gorilla. I speak for plants, for animals for nature. Hoku loves people. Coco loves the earth, but people are silly. I’m sorry Coco is crying.
Time is running out. Bring the earth back to normal. Help the Earth before it’s too late. Nature is watching you. Thank you Coco knew exactly what she was talking about because unlike humans she could not lie and took everything. Literally saying what she thought. So here is an extraordinary gorilla named Coco who learned how to talk. Understand, feel and worry. A gorilla that probably many of us have something to learn from. Be sure to write your opinion.