Name: Erin
Sex: Female
Born: Before 1998
Favorite food: Bananas and sweet potatoes (like her mate Ziggy).
Favorite activity: Grooming her daughter Cathy.

Erin came to IPPL in 2007 along with her mate Ziggy and their seven-year-old daughter Cathy. They had arrived from another sanctuary that was experiencing difficulties at the time, and we were glad to take the family in.

Erin’s former sanctuary home had acquired her in 1998 from the Hattiesburg Zoo in Mississippi, after aggression broke out in her group. Erin was injured and had to have her right foot and lower leg amputated. Since gibbons are arboreal, they naturally use a kind of arm-over-arm swinging (called brachiation) to get around, so the loss of her foot has not hampered her much. Erin uses her injured leg for balance whenever she moves about, and when she sits down she’ll often rest it propped up on the bars of her enclosure. She and Ziggy both are very sweet to their caregivers.

She still gets along well with her daughter Cathy, too, who is now mature. Typically, gibbon parents will eject their adult offspring from the territory where they’ve grown up, so the youngsters are obliged to find their own mates and territories. As yet, we have not seen signs of tension in the family, though, so we’ll let Cathy stay with her parents a bit longer. Erin still likes to groom shy Cathy, a sign that all is well.