Gorillas in Our Midst by Alan Toyne: So cute! Until a baby gorilla becomes a toddler, that is….

Gorilla babies are cuter than human babies, if Alan Toyne is to be believed. ‘She affects a smile,’ he coos of Afia, whom he must hand-rear when her mother can’t cope.

We hear about the little gorilla’s ‘rubbery flared nostrils, smooth ridges of dark skin across her muzzle, long eyelashes and crazy wispy eyebrows’.

You feel Alan would not be above opening his wallet and flashing a photo like a proud dad. ‘I was unprepared for the instinctive eruption of parental affection Afia awoke in me.’

Alan was a zookeeper in Bristol, working long days and nights with total dedication. ‘I lost track of what day it was and dreamt about gorillas each night.’

Looking after Afia, he has to wear a string vest – so the gorilla can cling on as if to its mother’s fur. The baby needs bottle-feeding every two hours and, as primates require around-the-clock social interaction, Afia comes home and sleeps in Alan’s bed.

It’s charming and comical at first, taking a gorilla in and out of the car seat, swaddled in nappies, the whole teething ring and teddy bear routine.

But gorillas are not sweet for long. Within a few months, ‘ludicrously strong’, they’ll have you in a headlock. At first, Alan’s daughter laughs: ‘That’s insane. You’re sat with a gorilla on the sofa.’ Soon enough, the gorilla is screaming with rage, a ‘shrieking mass of muscle’, jealously chasing the petrified daughter away, perceiving her as a threat.

Afia, and another requiring adoption called Hasani, get to be frighteningly boisterous, chewing the furniture and ripping out the wi-fi router. They slap Alan’s head and bite his arms, which become a mass of bruises.

As wrestling is part of the teaching programme, Alan is open to attack – but ‘without thick gorilla skin and fur to soften the play bites, they bloody hurt’.

What I wouldn’t fancy is the way gorillas pee and poo indiscriminately, on the string vests and into Alan’s pockets, ‘all over me keys’.

It’s the same for his colleagues. Once, going to the lavatory in the middle of the night, a fellow keeper found a baby gorilla grabbing hold of an intimate part when it ‘swung me old fella about’. I doubt that has happened to many people.

Another thing that made me laugh is that you can remedy shock caused by loud noises in young gorillas by sitting them in front of the TV when Richard Osman is on. They adore him, perhaps sensing an affinity.

Re-introducing the baby gorillas to the rest of the group is a dangerous process. Despite preparing females for surrogacy duties – by using soft toys saturated with the babies’ smell – rejection is still a possibility. The little gorillas may be crushed and killed, ‘torn quite literally limb from limb, right in front of us’.

As Alan admits, ‘working in zoos carries the risk of death’. He writes of a dominant breeding male gorilla weighing 31 stone: ‘If they get hold of you, you’re not coming out in one piece.’ If a gorilla decides to throw a punch, ‘my head would come off’.

The keepers stay their own side of the barriers, never going within arm’s reach – and the reach of a gorilla’s arm is long.

If an anaesthetised, fully grown gorilla is taken from the compound for medical treatment, Alan is armed with a rifle in the event it suddenly wakes up. The risk assessment forms fill page after page.

What Alan calls ‘primate social politics’ are not dissimilar to our own. This book describes in detail the way gorillas jockey for position, continually switching alliances.

There’s much punching and biting, the males ‘big and bulky’ with a ‘puffed up stance’, baring yellow fangs, snarling and swiping rivals with their huge hands.

All these characters, with names such as Sal, Moki, Kera, Komi, Kala and Ayana, were, I’m afraid, as confusing to me as the identities of the Russian gentry in Tolstoy. Yet Alan knows each and every one at a glance, noticing nuances of facial expression and body language.

When the gorillas ingest medication, it is concealed in peanut butter and honey, ‘universally adored by primates’. We hear about gorilla blood transfusions, vaccinations and CT scans, which are performed the same as in the world of ‘weird, hairless bipedal apes’ – Alan’s phrase for humans.

The average gorilla meal consists of eight cucumbers, 30 tomatoes, 12 yellow peppers, a few kilos of carrots, parsnips and courgettes, lots of lettuce and a coconut, which their jaws crack with ease.

The theme of wee and poo continues. Gorillas fling it about if distressed – and they often appear nervous and wary, emitting ‘high-pitched fear screams’.

There are ‘dried trails of diarrhoea down the glass windows’ and a zookeeper’s shift concerns much sweeping up and mucking out. The stench from the collected gunk ‘stays with you for the rest of the day’.

Not that this worries Alan in the slightest. As much as he tries to keep professionally distant, reminding himself that a gorilla baby is not ‘a miniature hairy version of one of us’, he nevertheless confesses to becoming ‘emotionally infatuated’.

Seeing the gorillas interacting fills him with ‘crazy heights of emotion’.

Of course, it is cheering to know the keepers adore their work – there’s a lot of blubbing in the staffroom following the death of one of their animals. But, in the end, Gorillas In Our Midst made me very uneasy.

The concrete pens, steel nesting sites, padlocks, cages, locks, gates, a ‘giant steel frame portcullis’ and the sliding mesh doors opened and closed by hydraulics – a zoo is a maximum-security prison.

Alan says it is all in aid of conservation as ‘there ain’t no wild left for half the species we got here’ owing to carbon emissions, pollution, snares, poaching and the bushmeat trade.

Well, that’s just another good reason to loathe humankind, which destroys all it encounters.

And if zoos move animals around ‘to maintain a level of genetic diversity within the captive population’, who wants to be kept in captivity? I’m sure on the whole gorillas would prefer to find themselves in West African rainforests.

Schools like mine in South Wales went on trips to Bristol Zoo, which opened in 1836. It’s shocking looking back at the tiny cages. I remember, too, Animal Magic on the telly with Johnny Morris. He dressed in a cap and polished boots (zookeepers resembled bus conductors in those days), impersonated the animals and gave them jovial words to say – an anthropomorphism that’s no longer in fashion, and rightly so.

The show was filmed in Bristol with 440 episodes between 1962 and 1983. I was not sorry, in the final chapter of this book, when Bristol Zoo closes and half the keepers are made redundant.

Where Alan goes and what he does today is not divulged. The animals are apparently moved to an area outside the city with more space. But it’s still not right, is it?