Kesho asserted his authority during a second attempt on Thursday, and during a scuffle between the whole group the baby's arm was seriously injured. The gorillas were separated and the baby taken to the on-site vet hospital.
When he was brought off the anaesthetic, Tiny was unable to breathe by himself, and vets suspected he had also sustained internal injuries.
Despite repeated efforts he could not be revived, ZSL said. Mr Field said: "We knew this was going to be an extremely difficult situation for the gorillas and their keepers and we've always been open about the challenges we would face introducing a new male in such difficult circumstances.
Motherly love: Tragic Tiny, a western lowland gorilla, is held by Mjukuu immediately after his birth in October. Even now he has gone, one particular photograph remains in my mind — of him dozing peacefully on her chest while she caught 40 winks on a bed of hay — her protective arm around him. What a glorious sight it was. That left a group of three females, Mjukuu, 11, Zaire, 36, and Effie, 17, without a male. As a silverback is always the focal group of any gorilla group, it was a hugely unnatural set-up.
For a start, the zoo keepers would have worried about infanticide, which often happens in the wild when a new silverback takes over a group if the old one dies or is driven away.
As gruesome as it sounds, these powerful silverbacks — often weighing a staggering 25st — just wrench the babies from their mothers and kill them with one blow. The zoo staff would have also known that the baby could be easily killed by any kind of scuffle in the enclosure. In reality, they are safe when they are about four years old — and in the wild only 30 to 50 per cent make it to adulthood.
But even though it was clearly a risky situation to bring in a new male, I understand why London Zoo went ahead. They have a cave, heated rocks, cascading waterfalls, African plants and an indoor gym equipped with ropes and climbing walls. And from speaking to devastated staff at the zoo yesterday, it seems that they went out of their way to pick a suitable candidate as the surrogate father.
That was Kesho, who at 11 was not quite at his testosterone peak — and who had been well socialised in Dublin Zoo. He arrived last August and immediately began to integrate with the two older females, Zaire and Effie. But Mjukuu — by then heavily pregnant — apparently went out of her way to avoid him, hiding on the gorilla island in a bid to keep separate. Just two months later, Tiny was born to the delight of her mother and public.
Yet Mjukuu clearly wanted nothing to do with Kesho. It has only been in recent months that she had warmed to him, greeting him through barriers and touching his fur — clear signs of friendship — and staff thought it might be time to try moving them together. It was at the second meeting on Thursday that things went wrong. Zookeepers say that suddenly Kesho became boisterous and a scuffle broke out. Tiny was killed when he and his mother Mjukuu were introduced to new silverback male Kesho for the second time.
Leading evolutionary anthropologist Professor Volker Sommer, an adviser on great apes to the International Union For Conservation of Nature, has been vociferous in his attack. Any undergraduate student of zoology could have told you what to expect! In part, I agree with him. Either staff left an all-female, miserable group without a silverback male, or they took Tiny away and hand-reared him for five years. But that would have meant he was never properly socialised and may have been unable to be integrated back into a group — something that is trickier with males.
The ideal scenario, of course, would have been for the natural father to still be alive — as we know silverbacks dote on their offspring, letting them clamber all over them and giving them access to their favourite foods before the females.
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