Word: gorillas
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Knorke was 17 months old and a sick gorilla when Nurse Rosemarie Hohler first saw him. Bought by the West Berlin Zoo to replace Pongo, its prewar gorilla bayoneted to death by Russian soldiers, Knorke had been flown in from the French Cameroons, and had promptly fallen sick of paratyphoid fever. Zoo officials sent Knorke to the City Hospital, put the sad little ape in quarantine in a sealed-off room, and explained that paratyphoid, though usually only a mild human disorder, can be fatal to gorillas. Looking compassionately at Knorke, 24-year-old Rosemarie volunteered to go into quarantine...
...months passed, a deep affection developed between the nurse and the baby gorilla. They would romp together uproariously. Knorke would race around the room, dive under Rosemarie's bed, scramble out the other side and leap into her arms. She found he was terribly ticklish over nearly all his body; even a slight tickling drove him into paroxysms of gorilla laughter, a rapid, staccato inhaling...
Many TV colleagues envy Muggs his income, his fan mail (1,000 letters a week) his fan clubs, his wardrobes (450 outfits, including a set of tails and a gorilla suit), his white Corvette, his travels around the world with accommodations in the best hotels. But he has earned them all: he understands 500 words, can count his fingers, play the piano, spank himself, do cartwheels, raise his arms when he wants to be taken to the bathroom, and perform numerous other monkeyshines, including raising TV ratings. He is also the only TV personality on earth who has been denounced...
...birth came as a surprise, since zoo officials knew that Christina was pregnant, but had little idea what a gorilla's gestation period is (in Christina's case it proved to be 259 days). Thomas dropped the egg and stepped into the cage. "I wasn't thinking of anything but the baby," he explained later. But Christina, who had probably given birth only three minutes earlier, was too dazed to attack him. She scurried into a retreat cage, and Thomas closed the door after her. Then he rushed with the baby to the zoo kitchen and removed...
...attendants put her in an incubator and started feeding her a special baby formula. At week's end the baby (whose father is a 400-lb., 11-year-old gorilla named Baron) weighed in at 4½ lbs., and was given a fair chance to survive if she weathered the first few days. If she lives, the happy zoo officials will conduct a city-wide contest to choose a name...