Name: Elizabeth
Sex: Female
Born: June 16, 1984
Favorite food: Figs.
Favorite activity: Sucking her thumb (like Peppy).

Elizabeth was born at Silver Springs Park, a tourist attraction in Florida. Her gibbon family was living on an island in the Silver River, and jungle cruise boats would pass by daily.

One day a cruise boat guide noticed that a newborn baby gibbon was being neglected and mistreated by her mother. The baby was removed from the island and hand-raised from Day One by Joanne Zeliff, a dedicated animal caregiver who kept careful daily notes of Elizabeth’s weight, food consumption, and development. (These notes were later to be extremely helpful to IPPL staff when we were hand-raising our gibbon Courtney, whose mother had similarly mistreated her.)

Elizabeth came to IPPL on March 17, 1985, after the Silver Springs management decided that hand-raising a gibbon was taking too much of the keeper’s time and would continue to be expensive for a number of years. Elizabeth was hand-raised by Shirley and IPPL’s animal care staff until she reached adolescence. Like other hand-raised gibbons (including IPPL’s Peppy), she acquired a thumb-sucking habit that she continues to this day.

When she became mature, we paired her with Ahimsa, who was Arun Rangsi and Shanti’s first child. They are still a happy couple (we often see them hugging each other), but Elizabeth also likes people and likes to see what kind of fascinating activities our volunteers are up to (she especially seems to like female volunteers; Ahimsa can get jealous!). If they have planted the flowerbed next to Elizabeth and Ahimsa’s outdoor enclosure with interesting-looking annuals, like pansies, Elizabeth will reeeeeeeach her long arms around the protective chicken-wire to pull up and eat the flowers.