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November 25, 2003Adios, Snowflake...
It is with a heavy heart that I must report the death of Snowflake, the world’s oldest (and only known) albino gorilla. He was put down (and I don’t mean demeaned) after a two-year-long fight against skin cancer.
When I read the headline, I was hoping that it was some other albino gorilla who had gone to that banana buffet in the sky. Unfortunately, he was the only one. That was the disadvantage to his having been the world’s only albino ape—if one died, just by default, it had to be him.
I won’t say that I knew Snowflake. He was a gorilla of few words—a primate of many acquaintances and few close friends. However, I did meet him once, during a short trip through Europe the summer after my junior year of high school. We spent two days in Spain, the highlight of which was our trip to the Barcelona Zoo. It was the most ghetto zoo I’d ever seen. Between the empty exhibits, the sun-bleached and chipping paint, and the mossy puddles where the concrete had been poorly laid, we all wondered how the place managed to stay open, much less turn a peseta.
And then we arrived at Snowflake’s enclosure.
Covered as it was with white hair, his immense, pink body reminded me for all the world of Ernest Borgnine. He looked like he should be sitting in an open garage wearing a stained wifebeater and too-short shorts, like somebody’s pissed-off grandpa. Snowflake deigned to gaze upon us, but only, I’m sure, because we had stumbled into his previous field of vision and it was too damn troublesome to move.
We wanted to teach him to smoke cigarettes and flip off the zoo guests. We didn’t, but we wanted to. What’s more, he wanted us to. We could tell. You could see it in his eyes—this gorilla wanted to give people the bird and suck down Marlboroughs. His was the strongest, most human sense of disdain I’ve ever encountered from an animal, before or since.
I'm sure Snowflake is in a better place now. Of course, living as he did at the Barcelona Zoo, that's really not saying much.
Posted by patrick at November 25, 2003 12:00 AM
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