I remember Koko was doing a gesture that goes across the top of her head and forward. We were telling her, “We just don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you say it another way?” She couldn’t. She just kept doing that one sign. Then, I looked at some footage of her brother at the San Francisco zoo engaged in play with another gorilla, and I saw the gesture. Finally, I understood what it meant. He did the same exact gesture and jumped off a rock to play with the other gorilla. It means “take off” in the sense of “jump off.” Koko wanted us to take off our lab coats. She and her brother had the same gesture, even though they had never met.
Morin: So, you’re suggesting that they have innate gestures?
Patterson: Yes, and there was another weird one both of them did
.. Morin: She’s aware of symbolic events?
Patterson: Very much so—birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. Even a month before her birthday, she starts putting out some of these cards with birthday designs on them—birthday cakes and things like that. We had a celebration, I think it was Easter, and Koko was very excited for the festivities to start. She even got dressed for the occasion, fashioning a bright-yellow piece of fabric into a skirt. Her timing was perfect.
Morin: Is her concept of time similar to the human concept?
Patterson: I would say, yes, definitely. So much so, that in terms of the passing of [her kitten] All Ball—even 15 years later, whenever she encountered a picture of a kitten that looked like All Ball, she would sign, “Sad. Cry.” and point to the picture. She was still mourning after many years.
Morin: I read that she met Robin Williams once and had a similar reaction when she learned about his death.
.. Patterson: This is really weird, but you know that movie Jurassic Park? They saturated the media with ads that were very graphic with dinosaurs eating humans and all kinds of things. Well, Koko saw them, and several days later one of our caregivers reported her acting very strangely towards her toy dinosaurs and alligators. She was acting as though they were real, and was very frightened of them, and didn’t want to touch them. She was using tools to get them away from her. I do believe she had a nightmare about them.
.. Patterson: Koko is more of a verbal manipulator and an object manipulator. Michael was the big storyteller. As soon as he had the words “cat” “eat” “bird” and “bad,” he was saying that cats eat birds and they’re bad.
Morin: He had a moral judgment about killing?
Patterson: Right. Look what happened to him and his family, and cats are doing the same things—killing others and eating them.
.. Patterson: Uncontaminated by humans, they are definitely closer to living in the now. Our problem is that we live in the past and we live in the future, but we very rarely dwell in the now. They are so much in harmony with nature, we surely could use them as a model.