Koko has always been very affectionate toward kittens (remember All Ball on the 1985 cover of National Geographic) and still entertains them as guests from time to time. In this clip she receives a visit from 5 kittens (thanks to the San Francisco Peninsula Humane Society). She picks a winner ("Tigger"), but will she invite Tigger to stay? Stay tuned for the sequel clip.
When Penny Patterson, a young graduate student in psychology at Stanford, first saw a tiny, undernourished baby gorilla named Hanabi-Ko at the San Francisco Zoo, she had little inkling that the sickly ape would become her constant companion - and the subject of the longest continuous experiment ever undertaken to teach language to another species. But within a year, Project Koko was underway, and in two weeks the gorilla was using correct signed gestures for food, drink, and more. Today, more than 25 years later, Koko - the world's most renowned gorilla - is drawing on a vocabulary of more than 1,000 words.
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