You May Be Startled to Learn How Many Humans Have Been Killed by Gorillas

With Harambe's tragic death nearly a decade behind us, folks online are now fantasizing about whether 100 men could take on a single gorilla — but in reality, that would be a wildly unfair matchup. Though there are no official databases tallying up the number of humans killed by gorillas — or any other animal, for that matter — experts suggest that that it's exceedingly rare for these "gentle giants" to attack humans. In fact, there are few documented cases of gorilla attacks on humans, and after an intensive search, Futurism was unable to find any reported cases of a […]

May 3, 2025 - 11:21

You May Be Startled to Learn How Many Humans Have Been Killed by Gorillas

Folks online are fantasizing about whether 100 men could take on a single gorilla — but in reality, that would be a wildly unfair matchup.

With Harambe's tragic death nearly a decade behind us, folks online are now fantasizing about whether 100 men could vanquish single gorilla in mortal combat.

Though there are no official databases tallying up the number of humans killed by gorillas — or any other animal, for that matter — experts suggest that it's exceedingly rare for these "gentle giants" to attack humans.

In fact, after an intensive search, Futurism was unable to find a single reported case of a gorilla killing a human at all. Only two instances of gorilla attacks on humans — both of which involved animals born and raised in captivity — have made waves in the digital age.

The first occurred way back in 2007, when a male western gorilla named Bokito escaped his enclosure at a Dutch zoo, abducting a woman and injuring her in the process. The other was in 2020, when a zookeeper in Madrid was mauled by a 29-year-old male gorilla when she entered the animal's enclosure, ending up with a head injury and both of her arms broken.

As terrible as both of those instances were, it's striking that neither gorilla actually killed their victims — and that both animals were captive-bred.

In 2016, shortly after Harambe was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo when a small child fell into his enclosure, wildlife biologist Ian Redmond insisted in The Guardian that in all the time he'd spent with gorillas in the wild — from roughhousing with younger males to accidentally startling a territorial female — he'd never once been hurt.

"These were free-living gorillas, though; if they don’t like your company they can leave," Redmond, who spent three years with famed primatologist Dian Fossey, wrote. "A captive gorilla doesn’t have that option."

There's a startling assymetry to the violence, though. While there are vanishingly few instances of gorilla attacks on humans even when factoring in the ravages of captivity, humans have killed gorillas and ruined their habitats to such an incredible degree that they're now considered critically endangered.

Poachers in particular are so staunch in their pursuit of bushmeat that they not only killed Fossey's favorite subject, Digit, in 1977, but also murdered Fossey herself in Rwanda less than a decade later.

As folks like Elon Musk and MrBeast join in on the viral debate, the actual record on the subject of man vs. gorilla is very well-documented: large groups of men have been killing gorillas for centuries, and will keep doing so until anti-poaching laws are actually enforced — or until all the gorillas are gone.

More on the gorilla meme: Ape Researchers Evaluate Whether 100 Furious Men Could Bludgeon a Gorilla to Death

The post You May Be Startled to Learn How Many Humans Have Been Killed by Gorillas appeared first on Futurism.