Koko the gorilla adopted two kittens, but their bond became something much bigger than an adorable animal friendship

Did you know that on her birthday one year, Koko the gorilla asked her handlers for kittens? Koko fell in love with one, and the other fell in love with her. Their bond would later teach us a lot about how animals purrceive the world.

There are certain things that cat people don't need fancy scientists to tell us. I know my cats have favorite people (sometimes I'm one of them, other times, unfortunately not), I know they hold grudges, and I know that they can somehow detect the exact meowment I'm about to stand up and choose that moment to fall asleep on my lap. This was one of my first cues to truly understand that animals have their own inner lives, but because I'm a cat owner, my "Aha!" moment just happened to be through emotional manipulation.

Koko the gorilla gave the rest of the world a pretty compelling reason to wonder about animals' consciousness as well. In 2015, when Koko was 44 years old, two tiny kittens named Ms. Gray and Ms. Black entered her life. According to the Gorilla Foundation, Koko was gifted a litter of kittens for her birthday on July 4th. She fell in love with Ms. Gray, and Ms. Black fell in love with her.

She watched them, nurtured them, protected them, and even developed individual relationships with them as they grew. She would sign "cat" and "babies" when referring to them, she wanted to be around them constantly, and honestly, I can 100% relate to that. I can not only relate to that, I do that every day.

Koko's love affair with the feline species wasn't new, either. Decades before, she famously bonded with a kitten named "All Ball," a relationship that put the unlikely animal pair on the cover of National Geographic! Unfurtunately, All Ball passed away later in life, and Koko's caregivers described her behavior in one simple way: mourning. 

We can sit here all day and debate exactly what Koko understood. Even after decades of research, scientists still debate interpretations of her signing. But we don't need Koko to have been secretly composing Shakespeare in gorilla sign language for her relationship with those kittens to matter. You can see it in the video below.

There she was, a walking powerhouse of a mammal, adjusting herself around kittens small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. She sought out their comfort. And their kisses, cuddles, happiness, and attention.

That's exactly what loving a cat looks like. Learning your tiny little weirdo's quirks and habits, discovering which scratch means "Moar scritches!" and which means "you have exactly 3 seconds to remove your hand before the claws come out." Missing them when they're gone. Rearranging our lives around their comfort without entirely understanding why we're doing it.

Maybe consciousness isn't about whether another creature can explain its feelings to us, but we see hints of it in whom they choose to sit beside, whom they search for when they're gone, and whom they learn to hold gently. For us cat people, that idea is purrfectly understandable - we've been getting emotionally attached to tiny, fuzzy weirdos who can't speak our language for thousands of years. 

Koko just happened to be one of us.