Gorilla nutrition in zoos requires providing both appropriate nutrients and sufficient dietary engagement to meet the foraging behaviours that occupy 50% of wild gorilla time.
Gorilla diet in captivity intersects welfare and health in ways that go beyond simple nutrition. Wild gorillas extract nutrients from a enormous diversity of plant material through behaviours — selecting, manipulating, peeling, foraging — that occupy half their waking time. A gorilla fed concentrated pellets satisfies nutritional requirements in minutes rather than hours, leaving a cognitive and behavioural vacuum that manifests as stereotypies, obesity and social conflict. Scatter feeding with appropriate browse restores foraging time and provides the cognitive engagement that is inseparable from nutritional welfare in a species evolved for active dietary procurement.