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Happy Birthday Koko
by John Darmanin
John is the Chairperson for the Vegetarian Society of Malta.
john@vegmalta.org
What has this got to do with our vegetarian website? Quite a lot I think! There is a lot we can learn from animals especially if those animals are our "next of kin".
KOKO is a captive female gorilla who at 1 year, captured the fancy of a certain psychology student Francine Patterson. The lady wondered whether she could study the learning and communicating capacities of primates for her doctoral thesis, but little did she suspect that her supposedly brief encounter with the animal would result in a life time bond. Indeed Dr. Francine Patterson and Koko have been together for the past 30 years. A avery similar thing happened to Dr. Roger Fouts, another psychologist who befriended the chimpanzee Washoe (See Folji Hodor Autumn 2001).
Dr Patterson's 30 year old experiment with Koko has not only forged a deep inter species bond between the two, but has served to reveal that these primates are truly deserve to be called "Next of Kin" because they are so similar to us in most respects.
Using about 1000 American sign language gestures, Koko can express abstract thoughts, judgments, concerns, loves and hates, sadness and joy etc; besides every day common parlance. She can construct meaningful sentences and is certainly conscious that she is not only a gorilla but the particular gorilla named Koko. She has the awareness of her Self. Indeed, evidence has been found for the existence, in less developed form, of almost every aspect of human behaviour.
The fact that Koko keeps and cares for her pets including a cat, paints pictures, has her favorite TV show implies that she has a unique personality similar to that of humans. This is the challenging discovery, that animals possess varying degrees of personality and even though there seems to be such a great chasm between our species and theirs, there is really not so much. We are not different in kind but in degree, we are more intelligent, more conscious, possess more personality but the difference remains one of degree not of kind.
I am never tired to be reminded of this similarity with other creatures, it rekindles my Spirit of my kinship with nature and the rest of creation. Looking at Koko and indeed also at wild gorillas is like taking a look through a magic mirror and meeting my ancient ancestor and I take comfort from the findings that this ancestor has been such a quiet and gentle vegetarian. There is something mysterious in looking into the eyes of a gorilla, something that seems to say Hello my friend I know you from somewhere!
Koko shows that animals can be our friends, companions, teachers and also healers, they have varying degrees of self-awareness, appreciate life, and trust their master in total blind faithfulness, how can we ever continue to exploit them the way we do? This is the basis of ethical vegetarianism!
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