Gorilla story

I used to be a member of London Zoo a few years back. It was while I was at drama school, and I'd go to see the animals to get build some kind of relationship with them. It was all very Stanislavski, I remember. After a time, I'd just find myself sitting with one particular animal for an hour or so, just to get to know him or her. The gorillas became my favourite. Salome and Kumba were young gorillas put into an enclosure together with a bunch of older ones. One winter day, as I was blowing my runny nose, Salome came over to the fence and put her hand through the wire. I reached across the railing and we touched fingers, briefly.

Then I took my hand back and blew my nose again on a tissue. She gestured to me for the tissue, so I found another one in my pocket and handed it to her. Amazingly, she blew her nose on it in the most theatrical way, shaking her head and putting the other hand on top of her head. It was the funniest thing, seeing such a huge, powerful animal being so comical.

A little later, a woman said something to the keeper and he shouted at me about not giving things to the animals.

He then went on to lecture to a group of children about the animals. One of them asked how the keepers move the gorillas from cage to cage. He told them that they were shot with tranquillizing darts so that the gorilla would be incapacitated. His reasoning was that the gorillas were such powerful animals, and they could pull a man limb from limb if they got hold of him.

And that got me onto an interesting train of thought. I realised that it wasn't that the gorilla would tear someone limb from limb, but that he could.

And then a penny dropped as to the way we are so often in human interaction. So often, we disempower others not because of what they will do, but what we fear they will do. So, many of us become the victims of another person's fears.

I can't help thinking that much of the problems of the world are similar to the realities that the poor gorilla faces, just by virtue of the way his power is perceived by others.