Couple living with gorillas for 18 years

Mr. and Mrs. Thivilon in France have raised a gorilla for the past 18 years and treat it like their own child.

Mr. Pierre and Mrs. Eliane Thivilon have raised gorilla Digit for 18 years. Photo: AFP

Pierre and Eliane Thivilon, from Lyon, were married but had no children. They decided to adopt a gorilla that had been abandoned as a baby and named it Digit.

According to Metro, when he first came to Thivilon's house, Digit weighed only about 2 kg. He was bottle-fed, educated and carefully trained.

For more than 10 years of raising Digit, Mr. and Mrs. Thivilon have never left their pet alone.

“We couldn’t let Digit spend the night with anyone else, which meant we couldn’t go out for 13 years,” Pierre said in an interview a few years ago. “We didn’t go on vacation, we didn’t go out for the night. We didn’t go to the movies, the theater, or out to dinner. Digit would be sad if we weren’t there, and if she was sad, we would be sad.”

Digit even shared a bed with his adoptive parents until he was an adult.

Digit is considered by Mr. and Mrs. Thivilon as their son. Photo: Reuters

Digit has now grown very quickly, becoming a giant gorilla and can no longer sleep with Thivilon and his wife.

It now lives in its own cage next to the house so it can grow up independently. However, Digit still needs a lot of support from its foster parents.

The Thivilon family now has a private zoo near their home, which includes more than a thousand animals such as monkeys, apes, snow leopards, tigers, lions and eight other gorillas that they rescued from several zoos and circuses.

According to VNE