The reunion after 5 years with the gorilla he raised in the UK. “He looked me in the eye with such intensity and love,” Aspinall said.
Two years ago, a lion’s loving reunion in the African wild with the two men who had raised him in London was a YouTube sensation. Now there’s a new animal star in town, and his name is Kwibi the gorilla.
You may have seen the video by now. A tall and aristocratic-looking Englishman rides a boat down a river in the African jungle hoping to find the gorilla he left there five years earlier.
In a deep voice, the man calls out, “C’mon! C’mon!” Finally, he sees his old friend on the riverbank. The man clambers out of the boat and up the bank. He sits in the undergrowth and Kwibi the gorilla greets him gently with caresses, sniffs, nose-rubs and hugs. The two gurgle at one another as the man chews on a leaf and then gives it to the gorilla.Much as the “hugging” lion called Christian did, Kwibi the gorilla introduces his friend to his wives and children. When the man finally leaves, Kwibi follows his boat down the river and sleeps across from the man’s camp. In the morning, Kwibi is still there.
Friday morning, Damian Aspinall, the man in the video, came to New York to tell TODAY’s Matt Lauer the back story behind the wildly popular video.A gorilla’s gurgleThe first thing Lauer asked was whether Aspinall was scared at all. After all, gorillas are wary of humans, enormously powerful, and potentially dangerous.
Loving 5-year reunion of man, and gorilla
And even though Aspinall had raised Kwibi from infancy at his zoo in the south of England, for the past five years the 10-year-old male had been living in the wild in a jungle preserve in Gabon. There was no guarantee Kwibi would remember Aspinall or, if he did, welcome him into his territory.
“I wasn’t 100 percent sure. You never know. He is a wild animal now,” Aspinall said. “But deep inside you believe that things will be OK.”Aspinall knew that for sure when he heard a certain sound that Kwibi made.
“The moment I heard the gurgle — gorillas have a gurgle, and it’s a very deep love gurgle — I knew that I’d be OK,” Aspinall recalled. “Right at that moment, everything stopped. The sounds of the forest stopped and the sounds of the river stopped, and I was just captivated in that moment. He looked in my eyes with such intensity and such love.”
But the danger wasn’t over. There was still the chance that Kwibi’s wives would not be as welcoming to this total stranger.“I was far more worried that one of the wives would be protective of Kwibi,” Aspinall admitted.Unconventional upbringingLauer couldn’t help but wonder what a gorilla smells like after five years without a shower and shampoo and guessed that it must be ripe.
“I love the smell of a gorilla,” Aspinall said. “It never bothers me.”It’s a smell he grew up with on his father’s estate in Kent in the south of England.
But for any layman out there looking to do the same, it might not end up as well as it did here.Gorillas like humans have unique personalities.This is a kind soul.
I don’t know how someone can watch such an incredibly moving interaction, between two different animals, and also feel like humans are somehow “special” or we understand. know more about things like love, joy, and friendship than the other animals with whom we share this planet.The breadth of emotions this gorilla experiences and displays is pure, beautiful, and unaffected by all negative traits.,
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