How Strong Are Gorillas?

Gorillas Are Enormously Strong!

Take it from some­one who knows:

No one knows [how strong goril­las are], because you can’t take a goril­la down to your local gym, obvi­ous­ly, and if you did it would be at your own per­il and the oth­er gym mem­bers’ per­il. We don’t know, but sci­en­tists esti­mate it to be about 10 times stronger than a full-grown man. And cer­tain­ly some of the things I’ve seen here at the zoo, 10 times stronger is prob­a­bly fair­ly cor­rect. For exam­ple, when I’m mov­ing things around inside their enclo­sure, there might be very large logs which I’m lit­er­al­ly unable to move, so I might call a cou­ple of oth­er keep­ers over, and between the three of us, we will slow­ly man­han­dle it, per­haps a few inch­es across the enclo­sure. Bob­by then will come in and then just with one hand will be able to swipe that same log a good few feet with­out any effort.

—Daniel Sim­monds, Goril­la Keep­er, ZSL Lon­don Zoo