Dear Friend,

In the above video, I first sign “Ndume” (tapping my front teeth with my index finger), then write Ndume’s name on a pad of paper for Koko to see.  At the time this footage was filmed in 2001, gorilla Ndume had been living at The Gorilla Foundation with Koko for ten years.

Koko then takes the pad and makes her own marks across the page. When I hold the page with the name “NDUME” up to the camera, you can see that one of her marks looks very much like an N, and another like a D.

What stays with me is that Koko did not just look at the paper. She answered, and her marks looked strikingly like the first two letters of Ndume’s name.

Responses like this are rare in non-human great apes, and moments like this continue to teach us how much we still have to learn from them.

With Koko love,

Penny Patterson
President, CEO and Founder
The Gorilla Foundation / koko.org

Conservation through Communication

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