It was 2016, and I’d been a zookeeper for seven years. I lived with my partner and two stepchildren in a Victorian terrace house in Bristol. We’d met when her kids were four and eight, so I had not experienced the early baby stages, the sleepless nights, nappies and bottle-feeding.
But that was about to change.
On 15 March, I parked my car outside the house as usual, but rather than bowling inside to shower and eat, I unclipped the car seat and carried a baby gorilla into the lounge. Afia had been born by emergency C-section at Bristol zoo after her mum, Kera, developed pre-eclampsia. I first took her home when she was four weeks old.
On the couch, she nestled in the crook of my arm and clutched my thumb with a delicate fist of wrinkled grey fingers. The trust in her dark eyes snapped awake an instinctive devotion in me – the foundation of the bond that grew between us.
I worked with a family group of seven western lowland gorillas at the zoo. Classified as critically endangered, they are at imminent risk of extinction in the wild. The captive population is managed collectively across Europe by a specialist team: zoos don’t own the species they keep, or sell them, but rather they maintain the genetic diversity within the population by moving animals from one collection to another. I followed industry-wide husbandry guidelines, but what we were doing with Afia had never been tried in the UK before. As a gorilla keeper, I was now part of the team that would hand-rear her.
Hand-rearing is a rare part of zoo keeping and the goal is always to reunite the baby with its own kind as quickly as possible. As gorillas rely on their mother’s milk for three years, the aim with Afia was to try to get her back with her mother or, failing that, train one of the adult females to become her surrogate mum. Afia would need to be acting like a normal gorilla infant by the time we introduced her into the troop; if we could achieve this within a year, she wouldn’t remember travelling in the car each night or sleeping in a bed with a duvet.
Baby gorillas develop more quickly than humans, so my parenting ride lasted just seven months. I wore a string vest, to replicate a gorilla’s fur, as the first thing Afia needed to learn was to hang on to me wherever I went. She slept on my chest at night, clung to me in fear at unexpected noises, and I helped with her first stiff-legged steps.
By day, we spent time with the adult gorillas, particularly with Kera, Afia’s mum. Adult gorillas are dangerous animals, which meant we would never go into the enclosure with them. Kera remained separated from the rest of the group and struggled to recover from the C-section. Our interactions were through grilled windows and doors in the gorilla house, but Kera was so sick and unresponsive that no maternal bond with Afia could be formed.
Soon, Afia began to ride on my back, furry arms clamped around my neck. She could climb and was trying to master swinging from one rope to another. I recognised her facial expressions – sleepy, solemn, inquisitive – and she had full trust in me, knowing that I would keep her safe. At six months, she was running around the lounge and throwing her toys about. My favourite expression was her play face, a grin that we both knew meant diving off the sofa and wrestling. I would take up my regular spot on the floor and wait for Afia to push the coffee table up against the couch so she could climb on to it more easily. She would spend the next hour leaping on to me or the cushions she’d chucked nearby.
My own family group had to be hands off, as part of the hand-rearing protocol. The kids mentioned later they felt waves of irrational jealousy. When I was rolling around on the floor, Afia chuckling with gorilla laughter, my partner said: “I can see now what sort of parent you’d have been for the kids at that age.”
We ate dinner together as a family, Afia on my lap, enthusiastically drumming her hands on the kitchen table and making grabs for the cutlery. The gorilla troop eats together at the same time, so sharing meals needed to be the norm for Afia, and she would look around the table at us all, squishing fistfuls of steamed sweet potato through her fingers. After dinner, she’d slump across me on the couch, asleep, briefly waking up for a bottle-feed before bed, where she would snuffle and belch cheesy milk breath over me. In bed, Afia had started off sleeping on my chest, but now she was older, she would slide off to snuggle next to me, or roll over and throw a hairy arm over my partner instead.
That’s how the routine went, until we arrived at our final night together. Afia sensed my sadness and slept with her head wedged under my chin. For the first time, I felt as if I’d lied to her. Kera had recovered, but as she continued to show no maternal instinct towards Afia, we were about to begin introducting her to a surrogate mum, an older female with plenty of experience.
My sped-up baby and toddler experience had fast-tracked me to a point that I’d yet to go through with the human kids: a taste of how it will feel when they, too, leave home. It changed the way I thought of my own family, with a realisation that the troop as we know it will disperse, our roles as parents steadily replaced by a desperate and fragile hope: that you’ve done all you could, and that life will be kind to them.
Gorillas in Our Midst by Alan Toyne is published on 10 April (Summersdale Publishers, £10.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
