A city zoo shut its gates three years ago. The gorillas never left.
The old ticket booth still has a fading “Back Soon” sign, curling at the corners like a bad joke. Inside, there’s a smell of damp straw and disinfectant, the same sterile tang that once meant routine. Now it means pause. A keeper in a hi-vis jacket walks past without looking up, keys clinking, the soundtrack of a place stuck between past and future. One silverback holds a rope and doesn’t pull. Birds nest in the rafters where banners once shouted about conservation. The turnstiles are still. A low thud from the indoor den. Then quiet. A different kind of quiet.
Locked gates, living beings
When the zoo closed, the official line was tidy: a temporary shutdown, a relocation plan, a promise of partnerships with sanctuaries. The paperwork would follow. It always does. Except here it didn’t, and the months stretched into seasons, then years, and the gorillas stayed where they were. There is food. There are checks. There is a roster and a logbook and a schedule pinned with a drawing pin that’s gone rusty at the edges. What there isn’t is movement. Not the kind that counts.
On a weekday morning, a neighbour leans on the fence to listen. She remembers the day the council taped up the gates, just after the last summer of crowds. “They said the gorillas would go in a few weeks,” she says, eyes on the weedy car park. A local group now drops off fresh veg at the service entrance, boxes of kale and beetroot, because it feels like something concrete. Drone footage taken by campaigners shows an overgrown moat, cracked pathways, a mural fading into chalk dust. The glass still gleams. The eyes behind it don’t.
How does a great ape end up in limbo? It’s a knot of licences, ownership disputes, and the sort of cross-border permits you’d struggle to explain over dinner. CITES paperwork, bankruptcy administrators, insurance clauses, and the quiet politics of who gets credit for a rescue. These animals are valuable, not just financially, but as genetics on a spreadsheet, as ambassadors on a brochure. Moving a gorilla isn’t popping a cat in a carrier. It’s months of health tests, crate training, a plane that can’t be late, and a destination that actually has space. Then the money runs thin. Energy bills spike. A promise slides to the bottom of an inbox.
What helps now, from your sofa
There is a way to help without rage-posting into the void. Start with proof. If you donate, pick organisations that publish vet reports, transport logs, and photos that aren’t just cute close-ups. Look for global accreditation, not glossy adjectives. Ask where an animal will live next month, not just the day after a rescue. Real solutions look boring on Instagram. They’re supposed to.
Write like a neighbour, not a warrior. A short, factual email to the council, the receiver handling the zoo’s assets, or your MP gets logged. Enough of those, and silence becomes admin work. Keep a notebook. Dates, responses, names. It sounds dry. It works. Let’s be honest: nobody does that every day. Do it once this week. Then again next week. We’ve all had that moment when looking away felt easier than looking twice.
Behind the scenes, the best keepers and vets are doing triage with patience and tape. They won’t post it. They rarely can.
“People think abandonment means no one cares,” a primate vet told me. “It often means the wrong people hold the keys, while the right people keep showing up.”
- Check accreditation: EAZA or GFAS signals standards beyond slogans.
- Back safe moves: Ask about quarantine, crate training, and end destinations.
- Skip the outrage carousel: Share updates that include contacts and next steps.
- Support enrichment funds: Rope, browse, puzzles calm stressed brains.
- Choose tickets wisely: Pay for institutions with transparent welfare records.
The long shadow of a short closure
Three years is an eternity to a mind that counts days with its hands. Gorillas learn the rhythms of a place: breakfast clatter, hosepipe hiss, the shuffle of boots, the burst of chatter at noon. Strip the audience away and routines hollow out. Stress shows as pacing, rocking, overgrooming until skin shows pink. Keepers do what they can. Scatter feeds, hidden treats, banana leaves, cardboard puzzles, a radio left on low for company. It helps. It doesn’t replace the dignity of a life that isn’t paused. There’s a strange romance that clings to abandoned places. This isn’t that. This is maintenance, compromise, and the slow drip of days that should have moved faster. **Legal limbo** has no soundtrack, only lists and waiting rooms.
What sits under the headlines is a clash of narratives. One side says the gorillas are looked after, and technically that’s true: calories, clean water, bedding, vet visits. Another side says care without change is a half-truth. Both can live in the same sentence. The better story would be a truck rolling at dawn, crates secured, an airfield lit like a quiet promise. The reality is a spreadsheet with gaps and an inbox with too many threads. There’s no villain you can tag. There’s a chain you can shorten.
Here’s the part that rarely trends. Zoos that close become knots that welfare teams untangle for years. A good exit plan costs money that exits first. If you want a number, it’s this: moving a single great ape safely can run into six figures once you count permits, sedation teams, air freight, and follow-up care at a compliant facility. That bill does not shrink because the enclosures look sad. And yet, when these moves happen, they stick. Gorillas settle. They start again. A father teaches a juvenile how to strip bark with patience. A young female hoots at dawn. The sound doesn’t bounce off glass the same way in a new home. It lands.
The pictures from inside the shuttered zoo still pull at the heart because they’re not dramatic. A hand on glass. A rope that sags from not being swung. A mural that reads “Protect What You Love,” peeling at the edges. It’s not a crisis; it’s a bruise. The kind you forget to check until a friend points it out in better light. Outrage flares. Action lingers. Everything that matters lives in that gap between spark and follow-through.
What would a decent endgame look like? A public timeline. A name on the transport company. A destination you can find on a map, with other gorillas already there. Names that don’t change every month. A court sign-off that reads like a clean door. No victory laps, just crates, straps, a sleep that wears off to a new, bright place. Then no story, which is how you know the story went right. The gorillas won’t wave goodbye. They’ll grip the crate slats, breathe, listen, recover, and then do the most ordinary, extraordinary thing: eat, nest, watch, be themselves. **Quiet survival** is the headline that never runs.
There’s a hard question under the easier ones. Should we still keep great apes in cities that can’t guarantee long-term funding? And if not, where do the current ones go, and who pays that long bill? Policy is boring until it has a face, and this one has four, maybe five, behind a half-clean pane. The next time a council votes on a closure, ask about the exit plan first, not the farewell party. It’s the dull bits that decide whether a promise is a promise or just a press release with a timer.
What the gorillas remind us
This story doesn’t need a tidy moral. It needs a shared memory. A zoo closed three years ago and some of its most complex residents never left. That’s the whole plot. The rest is choices. A few officials who can sign. A few donors who can fund. A few neighbours who can send a short email on a lunch break. And you, reading this, deciding whether to scroll or to act for three minutes while the feeling is still warm. **Empty turnstiles** don’t mean nobody’s home. They mean the audience left before the cast did. Where you live, there’s probably a version of this: a campaign with a name, an inbox with a person behind it, a door that isn’t as closed as it looks. Share it. Ask about it. Nudge it. Then do it again next week, because that’s how days move.
| Point clé | Détail | Intérêt pour le lecteur |
|---|---|---|
| — | Gorillas remain in a closed zoo due to legal and logistical dead ends | Understand why “care” without movement persists |
| — | Practical steps: who to contact, what to ask, how to give | Turn emotion into measurable pressure |
| — | What a safe relocation really involves | Spot real plans vs. pretty promises |
FAQ :
- How can gorillas be “abandoned” if staff still feed them?Abandonment here means stuck in a shuttered facility with no clear relocation date. Daily care continues, but life is paused.
- Why not move them quickly to any sanctuary?Great apes need accredited destinations, health checks, crate training, permits, and funds. Rushed moves risk injuries and bad outcomes.
- Who actually decides where they go?It’s a triangle: the legal owner or receiver, the relevant wildlife authorities, and destination facilities that agree to take them.
- What can a reader do that isn’t just shouting online?Email the responsible authority with a respectful request for a relocation timeline, support vetted groups, and share contacts with updates.
- How will we know progress is real, not PR?Look for dates, transport partners, vet sign-off, and a named destination. Vague “talks” without details rarely lead to crates on a runway.
