I’m a sucker for all things primate, but this popular video definitely gives me mixed feelings. Twenty years ago, a gorilla expert let his infant daughter play with the gorillas and made home videos of their play. I have problems with people who project human traits onto animals or see wild animals as enjoying our intrusion into their world. But setting aside the issues of whether this was good parenting, or even whether it was even sane, the video illustrates that our close relatives, the great apes, are more like us than they are different. To me, for we humans to let them go extinct would mean a death in the family.
http://www.examiner.com/video/toddler-plays-with-gorilla-caught-on-tape