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Watch This Gorilla Hopelessly Swipe for Love Like the Rest of Us

He waves through his potential suitors like some kind of Tinder lothario.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Screengrabs via Twitter user Sierra Anderson

Animals, like humans, have been known to drown their sorrows in food, quit their soul-crushing jobs, and even get jilted by the ones they love. Now, it looks like the gentle beasts of this world are also joining our pitiful, desperate crusade to conquer loneliness with the world of online dating.

Tinder for primates may not be a totally new phenomenon, but it's not every day you see one actually swiping through suitors. Over the weekend, Sierra Anderson apparently caught a gorilla at the Louisville Zoo doing just that, directing some man hovering outside his glass prison through photos of female apes, the Daily Mail reports. As the man brings up each photo, our bachelor ape, Jelani, seems to quickly pass them over, like some kind of Tinder lothario.

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While it might seem depressing that a gorilla in a zoo is drawn to some tiny screen over the company of his roommates—fellow gorillas Bengati, Kicho, and Cecil—Jelani is pretty up-to-date on the little rectangles we spend our days staring at. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, the silverback loves watching videos and looking at photos on guests' phones, similar to how infamous gorilla Willie B liked to watch TV.

Jelani was born in 1997 (meaning he's a certified millennial), which sort of explains why he seems to prefer looking for love online to, say, actually having sex. But unlike his fleshy human counterparts, it looks like Jelani might be spared from all the terrible pickup lines and the nightmares of a bad match for now.

Jill Katka, supervisor of the Gorilla Forest exhibit, told the Courier-Journal the zoo can't give Jelani his own phone since "he would take the phone apart to see what was inside of it."

For now Jelani will have to rely on good ol' Mother Nature to find love, rather than using the crushing void of the internet like the rest of us.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.