SAN DIEGO — A panel of tempered glass was apparently no match for a 10-year-old western lowland gorilla at the San Diego Zoo.
Denny rammed the glass at his enclosure as zoo visitors were there, breaking one of the layered panels, KSWB reported.
It happened on Oct. 11, KFMB reported.
Another gorilla was in the area and both were being cared for behind the scenes while the panel was being replaced.
Neither the gorillas nor any guests or staff members were hurt.
One visitor said Denny “had taken a running start, jumped and launched into the glass. He hit it with his elbow or forearm, like right in the glass directly in front of my face,” Katya Sutil told KSWB.
Over the 20 minutes she and her sister were at the enclosure, "the gorillas were going back and forth, kind of taunting each other. One would charge the other and then disappear, then it would happen again."
“When it hit in front me, I was so jolted I fell back a few feet. When I looked up to see what had happened, I saw the gorilla staring directly at me, making eye contact with me, and then a giant crack… 6 feet. It was pretty big,” Sutil said.
“It literally felt like an earthquake... before we realized that that was just him hitting [the glass],” Jackie Doubler told KGTV.
The behavior is typical of gorillas, according to an expert.
“Gorillas, particularly males, will often do what we call ‘charging displays,’ as a kind of an act of like showing off,” San Diego anthropology professor, Dr. Erin Riley, told KFMB. “What I don’t know, of course, since I wasn’t there, is whether or not there was something that kind of provoked, that display behavior. One of the things that gorillas actually don’t like is to be stared at directly in the eyes, and that’s not something that zoo visitors always understand.”
Riley said that Denny may have been playing but because he was watching the glass, something there may have caught his attention and made him uncomfortable.