An infant gorilla, hand-reared by keepers after his mother struggled to care for him, has been adopted by a surrogate mom. Western lowland gorilla Hasani was born at Bristol Zoo Gardens in western England in August 2020. Yet keepers quickly realized that his birth mother, Kala, couldn’t manage him. They designed a hand-rearing program, with six staffers on rotation to ensure that Hasani was fed up to eight times a day for a period of seven months. “We really wanted to get them back together and give Kala another chance to look after him,” Lynsey Bugg, Curator of Mammals, explained in a Bristol Zoo news release. In March 2021, keepers felt that Hasani was ready for reintroduction, and Kala was interested, but sadly, she continued to struggle with caregiving. After weeks of trying, Hasani’s keepers had to accept that it wasn’t working out. However, they had another idea. A resident female gorilla, …