After an exhausting weekend struggle with the end stages of kidney disease, Babs the gorilla was dead.
The five Brookfield Zoo keepers who knew her best asked everybody else to leave the private area where she lay on her back Tuesday morning (the day of Babs’ death as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text), arms outstretched.
Once they were alone with the body, the keepers opened doors in the Tropic World building to admit the members of Babs’ gorilla group.
It was a visitation, a “gorilla wake” that keepers said they felt might benefit the surviving animals. In Babs they had lost the most influential female in a highly complex social family.
Babs’ 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the first to file down to the body.
“It was heartbreaking to see,” said Amy Coons, a gorilla keeper for the last six years. “Bana came in with this stunned look on her face.”
Babs’ mother, Alpha, 43, followed. There was Beta, a 43-year-old female, and Binti Jua, 16. Nadaya, a 3-year-old male, came, and Koola, 9, brought her infant daughter, whom Babs had showered with attention since her August birth.
Only the silverback male leader, Ramar, 36, stayed away.
Bana sat down next to Babs’ head and held one of her dead mother’s hands in one of her own, stroking her mother’s stomach with the other.
“Then she laid down on the floor next to Babs,” said Betty Green, a gorilla keeper for the last 17 years, “putting her head on Babs’ outstretched arm.
“It was like they used to do in the exhibit, lying side by side on the mountain. Then Bana rose up and looked at us and moved to Babs’ other side, tucked her head under the other arm, and stroked Babs’ stomach.”
The other animals, too, each came to sniff Babs and gently touch the body, she said.
“Koola inspected Babs’ mouth for a while, then held her baby close to Babs, like she loved to do the last couple months, letting Babs admire her,” Green said.
“Nadaya was like a kid at a funeral. While she was ill, he spent a lot of time resting with her. He came down [to her body] and inspected and touched her, but moved away pretty quickly, playing with a sweet potato and just sitting and watching from a distance.
“Alpha, her mother, acted a little strangely. She did a couple of displays by running in front of Babs’ body, grabbed her legs, then ran past. She did that four times, not violently or moving the body, but like she was trying to wake Babs up.
“I had a headache for the rest of the day after all the tears I cried watching them,” Green said.
The gathering, which zoo primate curator Melinda Pruett Jones described as “a gorilla wake,” was a rough goodbye for the keepers in attendance: Coons, Green, Cherie Orum, Maureen Leahy and Craig Demitros.
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The keepers had agreed after Babs, 30, was diagnosed last September with an incurable kidney condition that if she began suffering too much at the end she should be euthanized, and that once she was gone, Babs’ family group should be allowed to be with her one last time.
They also agreed that for the last meeting, no humans except the keepers the animals interact with every day should be present, to avoid any distractions.
The emotion the animals showed in the farewell was not surprising, said Pruett Jones, because in life Babs had been a beloved, benevolent leader of the group.
“She was the dominant female of the group, the peacekeeper, the disciplinarian, the one who kept things in a harmonious state,” Pruett Jones said.
Once the staff knew last September that it was only a matter of time before Babs would die, they decided to do everything they could to minimize her pain and make her as comfortable as possible to the end.
“There was nothing we could do to reverse the process or repair her kidneys,” said Thomas Meehan, Brookfield’s chief veterinarian. “We considered a transplant, but that would put another animal’s life at risk for a risky experiment. We could have tried dialysis, but it would have immobilized her for long periods of time and kept her away from her social group. It was a quality-of-life decision.”
Instead, they treated her with drugs and a special diet, meeting every day to confer on her condition. Babs maintained her leadership position in the group, even showing Koola how to behave now that she had a higher status in the group as the mother of an infant.
As her condition began to take a downturn Friday, the rest of the group stayed by her side constantly, Pruett Jones said. On Tuesday morning, when Babs refused all food, began shaking and had trouble moving around, it was obvious the end was near.
“The entire staff had agreed that if it was obvious she was on her way out, we wouldn’t let her suffer,” said Pruett Jones.
Meehan came to Tropic World and mixed sedatives into some special treats that Babs accepted. When the sedatives kicked in, he began to anesthetize her before giving her a euthanizing drug.
“She was so weak,” Meehan said, “she died under the anesthesia.”
Usually when gorillas die in zoos, they do so within their group, with all the gorillas present. For the euthanization process, Meehan and the staff worked on Babs in a private area.
In similar situations previously, when gorillas died in presence of humans rather than gorillas, that was it. The survivors had no further contact with the dead animal.
Last month, however, most of Brookfield’s gorilla keepers attended a workshop at the zoo in Columbus, Ohio, where several weeks earlier keepers had euthanized a dying female gorilla, then let her family come in and see the body, videotaping the occasion. After viewing the video, the Brookfield keepers felt they should do the same if they had to euthanize Babs.
“We don’t know if there is any benefit to the animals for doing this or not,” said Craig Demitros, the lead keeper who has been with the zoo’s gorillas for 20 years. In the wild, gorillas are known to pay respects to their dead in a similar fashion.”
“We didn’t think it would hurt anything,” Demitros said.
The gorillas remained with Babs for about half an hour, but one by one they began to lose interest, so the keepers let them go back to the public display area and rejoin Ramar, the male leader.
“Bana was the last to go,” Coons said. “She would get up, move a few steps, stop and turn back to stare at Babs. She started and stopped several times before she finally joined the others.”