English businessman and casino tycoon Damian Aspinall was recently filmed reuniting with a gorilla he helped raise. His organization, The Aspinall Foundation, is dedicated to breeding and returning gorillas and other animals back to the wild. Aspinall decided to see how one of the gorillas he released 5-years-ago, Kwibi, was doing. At first he wasn’t sure if the gorilla would even remember him.
“The moment I heard the gurgle — gorillas have a gurgle, and it’s a very deep love gurgle — I knew that I’d be OK,” said Aspinall to TODAY’s Matt Lauer. “Right at that moment, everything stopped. The sounds of the forest stopped and the sounds of the river stopped, and I was just captivated in that moment. He looked in my eyes with such intensity and such love.”
As a baby, Kwibi was raised in a zoo in England but was eventually released in a jungle preserve in Gabon. Since then, he successfully began to raise a family.
View the video of the heartfelt reunion below.
Credtis: IFLS.
