The Quest to Save One Baby Gorilla From Illegal Wildlife Trade

The smuggling of wildlife, like all contraband, is enabled by corruption, and Nigeria has been a trafficking hub for years. In 2021, the country’s customs service created the Special Wildlife Office, which teamed up with a nonprofit organization called Focused Conservation the next year to tackle the problem.

In July 2023, Martin Young, an adviser with Focused Conservation in Lagos, Nigeria, learned that a man from Jordan was selling infant gorillas. He had already sold a couple of them to buyers in Morocco and Egypt. Now he was trying to sell Bili and sharing videos over social media to advertise the ape’s availability.

Young had an Arabic speaker contact the man from Jordan and pretend to represent an interested sheikh from Dubai. The seller informed him that the gorilla lacked government documentation for the legitimate transport of endangered species. This confirmed to Young that the sellers were knowingly engaged in trafficking.

What motivates the market for infant primates? Until a decade or so ago, it was largely a byproduct of the bushmeat trade: After adult apes were killed for meat and body parts, their babies were sold as pets. “But now these baby primates are actually the target of traffickers who are poaching on orders from clients,” Patricia Raxter, an anti-trafficking expert, told me.

And the big new driver of interest, experts believe, is social media. In 2017, for example, an activist group called the Project to End Great Ape Slavery pored through social media sites to identify 261 chimps and orangutans that appeared to have been trafficked.

“The forests are going to be emptied of great apes before very long, at the rate it’s going,” Daniel Stiles, a wildlife-trafficking investigator, told me.

Without the intervention of wildlife activists, Bili most likely would have been sold to a private zoo in the Middle East, China or elsewhere.

Instead, after her rescue, Bili was sent to a wildlife-rehabilitation center run by a conservation organization called Pandrillus in the southern Nigerian city of Calabar. Last April, I traveled to Calabar to see Bili, who shares an enclosure with Brendan and Mili, two infant chimps rescued from other traffickers.

Lindsay Maess, an American field biologist and a specialist in primate rehabilitation, led me to their enclosure. As soon as she unlocked the gate and walked in, Brendan and Mili jumped excitedly into her arms. She looked at Bili, who was sitting on a wooden platform. “You want to come?” she said, motioning with her head. Bili hopped to the ground, ambled over and hugged Maess’s leg. She walked out toward me, dragging the leg on which Bili was hitching a ride.

“Hi, Bili,” I said. Maess had told me not to seem too eager, so I did my best to play it cool.

She studied me with a somber look. Then she took my hand in hers, drew it close and gave it a lick.