All Ball

All Ball was a grey-and-white tailless kitten who became one of the most quietly remarkable animals of the twentieth century — not for anything she did, but for who loved her. Koko, the western lowland gorilla famous for having been taught a form of sign language, had repeatedly asked her caregivers for a cat. For her birthday in 1984 she was allowed to choose a kitten from an abandoned litter, and she picked a tailless grey male, giving him the sign-language name "All Ball." Koko treated the kitten with astonishing gentleness, cradling him as a mother gorilla would an infant, trying to nurse him and tucking him against her body. The pairing drew worldwide attention as evidence of how deeply an animal could form an attachment across species. The story took a sorrowful turn later that year when All Ball escaped and was hit by a car. When told the kitten had died, Koko signed words her keepers interpreted as "bad, sad, bad" and "frown, cry, frown," and made a sound her caregivers described as a kind of weeping. Whatever the scientific debate over how much Koko truly understood, the episode became one of the most widely cited examples of apparent grief in a non-human animal, and All Ball — a kitten who lived only months — is remembered far beyond her short life.