Kingo, the first western lowland gorilla ever habituated in the wild, has died, the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden announced in a Facebook post on Friday.
Zoo officials said he was in his late 40s and for most of his life, had been a part of the Goualougo Triangle Ape Project, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Congo Basin wildlife.
The Cincinnati Zoo has supported the project for decades, officials said.
In 2018, The Enquirer accompanied Cincinnati Zoo officials to a 100-square-mile region in the southern part of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, which habituated gorillas and chimpanzees call home. Kingo was one of those gorillas.
“Habituated” means the animals become comfortable with the presence of humans so researchers can study them.
Kingo was referred to affectionately as the “million-dollar gorilla,” because that’s what preservationists believed it cost to habituate him. It took at least a decade to do so.
“It’s a hard process,” Dave Morgan, a research fellow at the Lincoln Park Zoo, previously told The Enquirer about habituating gorillas. “People oftentimes get bitten. It’s scary. It’s stressful for the gorillas. It’s stressful for the humans doing it. But we’ve come up with techniques to mitigate that stress and the guys over the long term have learned how to interact with the apes.”
