Gorilla thriller Keeper's book lifts lid on helping raise apes at city zoo

T'S not every day you meet someone who's cradled a baby gorilla in a car seat, brought it home after work, and fallen asleep with it curled into their arm on Christmas Day. But for Alan Toyne, former zookeeper turned author, such moments are not just memories they are milestones in a life deeply intertwined with some of our closest evolutionary cousins.

- Lewis CLARKE

Alan's journey is a rare blend of science, compassion, and emotional endurance. His story, captured movingly in his memoir Gorillas In Our Midst, is more than an account of life behind the scenes at Bristol Zoo it's a candid meditation on human-animal bonds, the ethics of conservation, and what it truly means to care.

Alan Toyne's early fascination with primates took root during childhood visits to London Zoo. “I used to visit once a year when we went to see my Gran during the summer holidays,” he recalls. “That was the first time I saw a gorilla. I was fascinated by all the primates, the way they moved and interacted with each other.”

Young Alan joined the Dodo Club then part of what's now the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.

He later formalised his passion at East London University, studying anthropology with a focus on what he intriguingly calls “primate politics”.

“I was intrigued by the social hierarchies within different species of primate,” he says. “It mirrored our own so clearly. I looked extensively at chimpanzee, bonobo and baboon societies as a precursor to understanding human social systems.”

That anthropological lens would serve him well in the years to come, especially when he joined Bristol Zoo as a volunteer keeper a job that quickly turned into a career.