Name: Gus
Sex: Male
Born: Before 1990
Favorite food: Unusual things: canned beets, black olives, and the cores and seeds of bell peppers.
Favorite activity: Wrestling with his favorite caregiver.

Gus came to IPPL in March 2007 from another sanctuary, which had acquired Gus in 1990. We never learned much about his prior history, except that he had been raised as a pet. He has a rather protruding nose for a gibbon, and our former caregiver Lauren would claim he resembles Squidward from the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon.

Gus’s favorite caregiver is Hardy. Gus waits for Hardy to come and wrestle with him before being put indoors for the night; he’ll wait patiently, with his chin resting on the bars of his enclosure, his lips pooched out.

One evening when Hardy was especially busy, he didn’t go to wrestle with Gus right away. Hardy set down the bucket of bananas, meant for distribution to all of our gibbons as a bedtime snack, a little too close to Gus’s cage and stepped away to take care of some small chore. When Hardy came back, he saw that Gus had a whole banana in each hand—but when Gus saw Hardy approaching, he put down both of his bananas (!) and reached out and gave Hardy a great big hug.