Don't worry, I've told my raven to pass this message on the afterworldI hope someone passes on this message for you and he is understanding that you are sorry for saying he was something he was not....
Male Gorilla psychology
- Thread starter The Hedgehog
- Start date
The opportunities for males to move to breeding groups are relatively few and far between. That's why you get the situation such as Kumbuka was in. Castrating males is an attempt to reduce the number of males that have to be removed from groups as they mature.
The story I got from Twycross at the time was that EEP advised them to leave Matadi in the group when the new male arrived. But Oumbie, inexperienced with females after living in a male group most of his life, also tried to mate(!!) him, to which Matadi resisted unsurprisingly, which then made Oumbie attack him. As we know, Matadi was then very frightened of him and later removed from the group.
I think you sum up what happened when he arrived at Howletts very accurately. IMO they were premature in not giving him time to settle down, but they had never brought in a new male from outside the parks, since the groups were first formed. Maybe it was new ground for them. If they had blocked off the lines of site from Djanghou's enclosure, sooner, they might never have had to move Matadi on. I think Kiki's death so soon after his move to Antwerp was unfortunate too, but again Matadi wasn't really culpable in that either.
Incidentally he is expecting his second offspring( by Mambele) sometime soon I think.
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The Hedgehog
Well-Known Member
@Pertinax I have to let you know that you nearly killed me with laughter. I find it hysterically funny that a silverback Gorilla tried to have sex with a younger Black-back Gorilla,as Matadi would have been at the time. No wonder that Matadi was scared of Oumbie following the embarrassing incident.
Talking about Oumbie and the Gorilla family at Twycross Zoo,are Oumbie and Ozala’s three juvenile sons still with the group? In my view the adolescent Gorillas should be moved on firstly as keeping them with thier biological family is a waste of possible breeding males and secondly the elder they get the more dominant they will get and that could result in a nasty fight and even at worst a fatality.
Talking about Oumbie and the Gorilla family at Twycross Zoo,are Oumbie and Ozala’s three juvenile sons still with the group? In my view the adolescent Gorillas should be moved on firstly as keeping them with thier biological family is a waste of possible breeding males and secondly the elder they get the more dominant they will get and that could result in a nasty fight and even at worst a fatality.
If memory serves me correctly, they are kept together precisely because they are surplus for the purposes of breeding; to put things fairly bluntly, there is a heavy male bias in the captive population and keeping bachelor groups of siblings - and other such measures - is one of the few means of dealing with this issue.
As a follow up to this discussion, silverback Matadi- originally born at Twycross Zoo, has become a father again for the second time at Antwerp Zoo. So another success story for an erstwhile 'difficult' male.