Owner Is Hoping Hawaii Will Get Koko to Say Yes

The owner of Koko, the “talking” gorilla, wants to move the famous ape to Hawaii, the land of honeymooners, in hopes that a romantic change of climate will encourage her to mate.

Koko, 15, whose greatest affair of the heart has been with a pet kitten, has been fruitlessly matched with Michael, a 13-year-old male gorilla, since 1981 on a Woodside farm on the San Francisco Peninsula.

The two gorillas sometimes show interest in each other, but never at the same time, says their owner, researcher Francine Patterson. Koko seems to think of Michael as a brother, she said.

But experts say female gorillas will sometimes become pregnant by males they are reared with when they are moved to a new environment. So Patterson wants to move her gorillas to a 600-acre preserve owned by the Hawaiian Humane Society.

Patterson claims to communicate with Koko in American sign language. The gorilla gained fame in 1984 with the sorrow she expressed over the death of a tailless kitten she had named “All-Ball,” which was hit by a car. The gorilla later was given two replacement kittens.

Patterson got permission to teach American sign language to Koko, daughter of the San Francisco Zoo’s Bwana, in 1972 when she was a Stanford graduate student in psychology. She eventually bought both Koko and Michael and established the nonprofit Gorilla Foundation.