Koko watches intently a DVD movie on her TV that she has seen several times before. It is called Tea with Mussolini. When it comes to a sad part, where the boy has to say goodbye to all of his relatives and waves goodbye on the train, Koko turns away from the TV. She then proceeds to sign: "Frown, sad, cry, bad, trouble, mother and Koko-love." Her eyes also look very watery. (Gorillas cry too.)
Lesson: There is mounting scientific evidence that great apes can feel empathy for others. This example points to the possibility that gorillas, in particular, may also be able to empathize with fictional human characters portrayed by actors—or at least be moved by them.
Koko tries on a pair of sunglasses and knows she looks good in them. However, Penny refers to them as "little alien glasses" which Koko seems to find insulting, as indicated by her final comment (in sign language). Note also that Koko attempts to clean her glasses by first "huffing" on them to create some moisture, and then rubbing them with her finger. Penny then offers to bring her a kleenex to complete the job. Another thing to note is that Koko is actually signing "glass" when she taps on the glasses with her fingers.
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.
