Lately I’ve been reading about lowland gorillas and the fact that they’re dying off in our zoos. I love all animals as do my daughters, and we always had plenty when they were growing up. Now I don’t have any, but I watch Animal Planet quite a bit. Just the other morning I had Animal Planet on as I was getting ready for my shower. It was a program about fixing up animals that were too fat, lame, etc. One was Archie who was a really, really fat cat and couldn’t seem to lose the weight. So the vet instructed the owner what to do according to diet and exercise. So when I came out of the shower they were still talking about Archie and the narrator was saying, “There was much running up and down stairs and playing with his balls.” I assumed they were talking about Archie, the cat – not the owner. Anyway, it all worked out and several years later Archie was his old self, whatever that was . . . . . . . . oh my, I seem to have forgotten what I started talking about.

Now I remember . . . it was about lowland gorillas. It all started when Mopie, a 430- pound lowland gorilla at Washington D.C.’s National Zoo, suddenly dropped dead on July 3, 2006. He had earlier been diagnosed with a form of heart disease known as fibrosing cardiomyopathy where the healthy heart muscle turns into fibrous bands unable to pump blood. But Mopie had never shown any symptoms of the disease and appeared healthy. Two days earlier, the zoo had lost its only other male group leader, a silverback named Kuja. He died while undergoing an operation to implant an advanced pacemaker. He, also, had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure related to cardiomyopathy.

And there was Babec, a lowland gorilla at the Birmingham Zoo in Alabama, who was eating less and clutching at his chest in early 2003. The staff veterinarians examined him and found that he had cardiomyopathy. By the summer of 2004 he was in pretty bad shape, and the zoo decided to perform a risky procedure which was a first for a gorilla. They implanted an advanced pacemaker in Babec’s chest that would correct his heart’s electrical circuitry and restore its ability to contract properly. The operation was a success, and Babec’s prognosis is excellent. I feel a great affinity with Babec as I, too, have a pacemaker, but I had to wait two years before my condition was diagnosed properly. After months of prescribed antidepressants (I wasn’t depressed) and a shrink (I think my doctor thought I might be crazy as he couldn’t find what was wrong with me), he finally sent me to a cardiologist who had me in the hospital within days for a pacemaker implant. Maybe if I had clutched at my chest and started eating less like Babec, I would have had the correct diagnosis a lot sooner. Babec got an advanced pacemaker, and now I want to know if mine is advanced. I’ll certainly ask my cardiologist on my next visit. I hope Babec appreciates his pacemaker – I know I like mine a lot as I’d be dead without it which is not a pretty thought. I have some advice for Babec: When going through security at airports, don’t try to go through the one for normal people. You must go through a special one for people like me . . . and you.

In November of 2006, ape experts, human cardiologists, zoo epidemiologists, pathologists and managers from around the country met at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago to establish the “Gorilla Health Project.” Their first task was to build a National Gorilla Cardiac Database that lets veterinarians track rates of heart disease and death, and to learn why scar tissue was replacing cardiac muscle in apes. I hope they can find a way to keep the few lowland gorillas we have in captivity healthy. They’re disappearing in the wilds from poaching and encroachment by humans who are gradually taking over the gorillas’ habitat. I say too many humans and not enough gorillas.