A gorilla drawing9/10/2023 The contrast between the two gorillas was so pronounced that Ivan became a national animal welfare concern. The film featured Ivan in his small enclosure and another gorilla, Willie B., who had previously been living in similar circumstances, but had since been released in a large zoo habitat and was re-learning naturalistic gorilla behavior. In 1991, National Geographic Explorer aired a documentary entitled The Urban Gorilla. The community collected signatures, raised and donated money to PAWS, took out newspaper ads, and raised $30,000 to buy Ivan from the B&I shopping center to be re-homed within Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. PAWS encouraged the community of Tacoma and other nearby cities to protest and to boycott the B&I shopping center. In 1987, the animal rights group Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), upset at the conditions in which Ivan lived, began a campaign on his behalf. Ivan's story was fictionalized in the 2012 book, The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate, which was adapted into a 2020 film of the same name. He spent his remaining years at Zoo Atlanta and died from complications during a medical procedure in August 2012. Shortly after this, he was placed on permanent loan to Zoo Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia. For the first few years of his life he lived with his owners, but he soon grew too big for a human house and they moved him to a 14' x 14' concrete enclosure on display to the public at the B&I shopping center in Tacoma, Washington, where he spent the next 27 years of his life.Īfter local animal welfare organizations successfully campaigned for his release to a facility that could care for Ivan properly, in 1994 he was placed at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. He was captured from the wild as a baby and brought to live with humans. Ivan was a western lowland gorilla born in 1962 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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