![]() ![]() And according to Tacoma historian Michael Sullivan, it very much fit the vibe of the place, which was known as "the circus store." Among other things, he’d stripped all the fabric off the furniture.įor the owners of the B&I, having a gorilla on site was obviously a draw. The family says they loved him, but he was just getting too big and rambunctious to stay in their house. Ivan went from being just one of the kids to living in a cage in the B&I store. At one point, the family even took Ivan to Hollywood, where he starred in an episode of the TV show “Daktari.” He stayed in a motel with the family during filming. There are home movies from that time - of him eating ice cream, roughhousing with the other kids, getting a snack out of the fridge and cuddling with the human mom. He lived with the family who ran the pet store at the B&I. The girl gorilla died, which left just Ivan.įor his first three years in the Northwest, Ivan’s life looked, from a human perspective, pretty ideal. They were purchased, apparently you could still do that then, by the B&I store and shipped to Tacoma. That’s when Ivan and a baby girl gorilla were captured in what was then the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To understand how this magnificent silverback gorilla ended up living in a concrete cell in a rundown strip mall in Tacoma, you have to go back to 1964. ![]() I’ve been coming to see him since I was a little girl,' ” Schmidt said. “I remember one lady, I asked her, did it trouble her the situation he was in, and she was like, 'Oh, no. What surprised her was how some people who’d lived in Tacoma all their life saw his predicament. It’s like being in solitary but where everybody can see you all the time,” Schmidt said. Little kids would come and tap on the window, and people would take photos. ![]() “It’s funny, when you mentioned Ivan, I’m like, I still think about Ivan all the time because it was just one of the saddest things that I saw. “For me, I didn’t really know what to expect when I went there, and when I went in there, I was just devastated,” Schmidt said.Īt the time, she was doing a story for NPR about Ivan, who was in the news because animal rights activists were pushing to get the gorilla relocated to a more appropriate environment. Suffice it to say, her impression was a little bleaker than what’s portrayed in the movie. My friend and former colleague Jenny Schmidt visited the store in the early 1990s. There was a window so people could look in at him. Believe it or not, the movie was inspired by real events that actually played out in our area, in south Tacoma.The popularity of the movie got me thinking about the true story of Ivan the gorilla and his lasting legacy for Tacoma.įor nearly 30 years, beginning in the 1960s, the real Ivan lived in a concrete enclosure inside the B&I shopping center on South Tacoma Way. “Our study shows that there is still a lot to explore and discover about our closest living relatives, and that Loango National Park with its unique mosaic habitat is a unique place to do so.If you’ve seen Disney’s family film “The One and Only Ivan,” you know it tells the story of a lovable gorilla who lives in a shopping mall with other talking animals but longs to return to the natural world to be among other gorillas. “We are only at the beginning to understand the effects of competition on interactions between the two great ape species in Loango,” study co-author Simone Pika, a cognitive biologist at Osnabrück University in Germany and co-leader of the Loango Chimpanzee Project, said in the statement. Researchers say changes in temperatures and other climate factors are causing “a collapse in fruit availability” in the tropical forests of Gabon. “It could be that sharing of food resources by chimpanzees, gorillas and forest elephants in the Loango National Park results in increased competition and sometimes even in lethal interactions between the two great ape species,” said Tobias Deschner, co-leader of the Loango Chimpanzee Project since 2005 and a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.īut climate change could be complicating hunts for food.
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