Two days in and those fears have receded as G-Anne has taken to her new role. Mogo Wildlife Park is located in a small town of the same name on the coast of New South Wales, Australia. “He’d lost color, looking very dull in the eyes, and so we rushed him up to the vet block, and he proceeded to crash quite quickly.” Zoo staff had intended to feed him and try again, but when Staples picked him up, he said, “his demeanor changed.” “And then they proceeded to step over him to get food and were sort of interested but not interested like we really had expected.” “They basically walked straight over to him, looked at him and then walked away,” Staples said. By then, the infant was hungry, so they fed him a bottle and attempted to give him back to his mother and grandmother the next day. Kipensi had failed to pass the placenta, a concern for veterinarians who worried about the risk of infection, and she didn’t demand her partner return the baby, as Staples said she might have been expected to do in the wild.Įventually, Kisane put down the baby and zoo staff rushed in to grab him. “We’re not really ever going to know why but I like to think that maybe dad just tried to get involved because he saw that there was something wrong with mom,” Staples said. But you know, Kaius was just over 2 kilos … so it’s just this huge size difference.”įor 14 hours, zoo staff tried to coax Kisane to give the baby back – offering food that he’d need two hands to grip and moving females – Kipensi and her mother Kriba – into different areas of the gorilla house so he’d follow them and put the baby down. “He was actually holding the baby quite gently. “It was terrifying because you just wondered if he was going to do something stupid,” Staples said. Newborn gorillas are typically smaller than full-term human babies, and at 2.2 kilograms (4.85 pounds), Kaius seemed to be doing well – until Kisane, a giant compared to his tiny newborn, took the infant from his mother. Kaius was born at the wildlife park last October to first-time parents, 10-year-old mother Kipensi and 17-year-old father Kisane, a hulking silverback weighing some 220 kilograms (485 pounds). Kaius holds onto Chad Staples as they walk around the zoo. “It makes me so happy to see the two of them together now,” Staples said. Then on Friday, Staples watched with wonder – but mostly relief – as 10-month-old Kaius shared a breakfast of sweet potatoes and tomatoes with G-Anne, an unrelated 42-year-old female gorilla, who for now seems happy to assume parenting duties in the zoo’s gorilla house. “I just laughed I thought, ‘Oh my goodness.’”Īs he got older, Kaius would cling to the zookeeper’s back as they walked around the zoo. “With a baby, you’ve only got to deal with some little hands that might help, but with a gorilla, he was really right into making it very difficult,” he said. In the early months, Kaius slept in Staples’ bedroom, and the zookeeper regularly fed him milk and changed his diapers – a difficult task to perform on a primate that’s much stronger than a human baby and able to grip with both his hands and feet. Even just looking at his eyes, it’s just like when you look at a newborn and they just take in the whole universe with every blink,” Staples told CNN of Kaius, the wide-eyed baby gorilla he’s reared from birth. In many ways, raising a baby gorilla is very similar to nurturing human newborns, says Chad Staples, a father of four and the director of Mogo Wildlife Park, a small private zoo in the town of the same name on Australia’s southeastern coast.
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