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If you want an audience to take heed of what you have to say, sometimes the messenger who delivers it for you can be just as important as the message itself. Depending on the nature of your communiqué, you may find it has a much greater impact on your intended audience if it is conveyed a a sympathetic figure who can tug at people's heartstrings (e.g., a child, a Native American, a mother, a veteran) or a respected figure whom viewers perceive as knowledgeable about the subject at hand (e.g., a judge, a policeman, a college professor). A messenger who brought both those qualities to the table was Koko the gorilla, a primate who purportedly understands approximately 2,000 words of the spoken human language and can communicate her thoughts to humans via her use of more than 1,000 signs of what 'Gorilla Sign Language' (a modified version of American Sign Language). In 2015 two non-profit organizations, the Gorilla Foundation (who oversee Koko's care and training), and NOE Conservation (who seek to safeguard biodiversity), teamed up to produce a Public Service Announcement (PSA) featuring Koko in conjunction with the United Nations Climate Change Conference (also known as the COP21 Climate Conference) held in Paris in December of that year: That video captured Koko supposedly signing about the importance of our protecting and preserving nature, a message that (given the nature of the proceedings it was associated with) was interpreted as a plea to acknowledge the issue of climate change. The NOE said as much, declaring that the video captured Koko reacting after she has been informed about what is at stake at COP21. And the press release issued with the video by the Gorilla Foundation asserted that Koko was indeed being clear about wanting to convey the notion that Man is harming the Earth: We humans may disagree on the possibly deleterious effects our activities are having on our global environment, but how could we possibly ignore a poignant plea from a gorilla — a message delivered by a personification of Nature itself, who is not coincidentally regarded as sympathetic and knowledgeable regarding the subject at hand? Some viewers took the video a little too literally, however, and were surprised at Koko's pithy and timely exhortation to heed the perils of global warming. But nothing about the video indicates that Koko can actually entertain, much less communicate to humans, thoughts about environmentalism. For starters, as noted in a 2014 Slate, human-ape communication may be far more about anthropomorphization than actual linguistic expression, especially when it comes to the expressing ideas rather than communicating basic needs: In any case, Koko's supposed message about climate change and biodiversity is completely lacking in context: the viewer has no idea what any offscreen handlers might have said or done to elicit the signing she produces, or whether the video is anything more than a collection of disjoint, completely unrelated signs strung together into a narrative fashioned by humans rather than a gorilla. Even if we were to assume the (highly unlikely) possibility that Koko's signing was completely spontaneous and unguided, her message is highly ambiguous and non-specific — outside of humans' suggesting a framework for us to employ in interpreting it: For all we know, this discourse might have been prompted by Koko's having just witnessed a clumsy gardener on a power mower carelessly amputating a crop of blooming roses in a nearby flowerbed, and she's expressing that she wants someone to repair the damage by reattaching the severed buds to their stems. Even the Gorilla Foundation admitted that Koko was briefed on the subject at hand and provided with a script for the video, which was edited from a number of separate takes: Barbara King, a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary who writes about human evolution, primate behavior, and the cognition and emotion of animals, commented on the the Koko PSA thusly for NPR: King also quoted Sherman Wilcox, professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, as saying in reaction to this video: A Huffington Post article on the topic similarly quoted skeptics from the fields of linguistics and primate research: The Koko climate change PSA is a novel and compelling way of focusing viewer attention on a political message, but it's basically just a staged commercial, not an expression of sagacity about Nature issued by a non-human creature.
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