Happy happy

In Sunday's Boston Globe magazine is a story called A Star Is Born, about a baby gorilla and the zoo's breeding program. Throughout they quote assistant curator Jeannine Jackle, who manages the Tropical Forest and who has worked closely with the zoo’s gorillas for just over two decades. Towards the end she does something I find peculiar. I mean, I understand resisting talking about gorillas like they're people, anthropomorphizing them instead of treating them like gorillas, but the adjective she's resisting - the one she uses hoping she's not "being too anthropomorphic"? It's happy.

Goodness me. Surely we can say gorillas can be happy. Dogs can be happy. Heck, horses can be happy. Surely gorillas can be. That's not a complex emotion. It's not self-abnegating love, or schadenfreude, or smug I-told-you-so-ness. And gorillas are pretty complex beings. I'd think happiness was well within their range.

“She seems content,” Jackle says. “She’s doing a lot of the behaviors that we see when they’re – I hate to be anthropomorphic – but when they’re happy. They wiggle their toes, they wiggle their arms. She’s holding the baby and walking back and forth. And if I can say that’s a happy gorilla without being too anthropomorphic, that’s a happy gorilla.”