Binti Jua

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Binti Jua is a Western Lowland Gorilla female in the Brookfield Zoo, in Brookfield, Illinois, outside of Chicago.

Binti Jua (whose name means "Daughter of Sunshine" in Swahili) is the niece of Koko, the world famous gorilla that knows and communicates using American Sign Language. Her mother's name is Lulu, originally from the Bronx Zoo, but now residing at the Columbus Zoo. Her father's name is Sunshine (from the San Francisco Zoo).

1 August 16, 1996
2 Aftermath
3 Footnotes
4 Further reading

[edit] August 16, 1996

Binti is most well known for an incident which occurred on August 16, 1996. A three-year-old boy climbed the wall around her zoo enclosure and fell 6 m (20 feet) onto concrete below, rendering him unconscious. Binti walked to the boy's side while helpless spectators screamed, certain the gorilla would harm the child. Another larger female gorilla approached, and Binti growled.

Binti picked up the child, cradling him with her right arm as she did her own infant, and carried him 18 m (60 feet) to an access entrance, so that zoo personnel could retrieve him. Her 17-month-old baby, Koola, clutched her back throughout the incident. The boy spent four days in the hospital and recovered fully.^[1]

[edit] Aftermath

After the incident, experts debated whether Binti's actions were a result of training by the zoo or animal altruism. Because Binti had been hand-raised, as opposed to being raised in the wild by other gorillas, she had had to be specially trained to care for an infant and to take her child to personnel for examinations. One could assume that this training resulted in her behavior when the little boy fell into her enclosure.

However, there are many other examples of animals (especially primates) demonstrating apparent altruism. The strongest argument for the altruistic explanation involves a situation very similar to Binti's, in which a male gorilla named Jambo, of Jersey Zoo, protected a child who had fallen into his enclosure. Jambo was not trained to care for children and was raised in captivity by his own gorilla mother, so that his actions may have involved an instinctive sense that the child needed his help. Similar behavior has been seen in chimps who "comfort" each other after an attack or other trauma.