Ivan (gorilla)

Ivan (1962 – August 21, 2012) was a western lowland gorilla born in 1962 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was captured from the wild as a baby and brought to live with humans. For the first few years of his life he lived with his owners, but he soon grew too big for a human house and they moved him to a 14' x 14' concrete enclosure on display to the public at the B&I shopping center in Tacoma, Washington, where he spent the next 27 years of his life. After local animal welfare organizations successfully campaigned for his release to a facility that could care for Ivan properly, in 1994, he was placed at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. Shortly after this, he was placed on permanent loan to Zoo Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia. He spent his remaining years at Zoo Atlanta and died from complications during a medical procedure in August 2012. Ivan's story was fictionalized in the 2012 book The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, which was adapted into a 2020 film of the same name.