“Lady” is a gorilla kept at the Al Ain Zoo, the biggest zoo in the UAE. We visited the zoo, for the first time, earlier this year.

Her 40th birthday was observed yesterday at the zoo, with birthday cake and press opportunities.

How festive Lady felt is not known, of course.

One thing that stuck out in the story?

How alone Lady is.

She is western lowland gorilla, a species said to be endangered, and she came to the UAE from Cameroon in 1978, when she was thought to be four (or three) years old.

Being sent to a zoo may be a primary factor in her reaching age 40. Had she stayed in Cameroon she may have been killed and eaten by humans, or died of disease, decades ago.

Her keepers seem keen to make her comfortable. She has a special diet, and two “companion” rabbits which keepers believe she likes to have around.

She has a television to watch and apparently likes Barney & Friends as well as documentaries about other animals.

This photo gallery has two pictures showing Lady drinking liquid out of a glass, which I didn’t know gorillas could do, but the famous Koko, the gorilla who was thought to recognize up to 2,000 words, is also a lowland gorilla.

After it’s all said and done, Lady seems to live a solitary existence, in terms of her species. She lived with another lowland gorilla, Maxi, in Al Ain for several years but Maxi died in 1998, The National’s story reports. Lady has been the only gorilla in the Al Ain Zoo since then — 17 years, that would be.

Clearly, Lady hasn’t pined away to the point of dying from loneliness, but it seems reasonable to imagine she would rather have someone from her species around, and not just the two rabbits and the people staring at her from the other side of windows.

Or maybe gorillas like being alone. It always seems a little presumptuous to assume we know what a big and intelligent beast might be thinking. For her sake, I hope she was good and sick of Maxi.