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Will Young's 'gorilla admirer' gets him into trouble

09/07/2007

Will Young had a rock flung at him by a male gorilla during the filming of the BBC's Saving Planet Earth series.

The singer revealed that after a female gorilla at an orphanage in Cameroon took a shine to him, the other males reacted angrily.

He told the Sun: "One of the gorillas kept making this noise that meant she fancied me.

"It didn't go down too well with the males. One gave me this look out of the corner of his eye and flung a huge rock against the fence right in front of my face."

The pop star took part in the BBC series by travelling to Cameroon to see the ongoing danger that gorillas face from poachers and deforestation.

On the programme Young found that 15 to 20 gorillas are sold every day as meat in markets, while roads for logging were providing easy access for commercial hunters to find the gorillas.

About 100,000 western lowland gorillas remain in the wild and according to the programme between one and five million tonnes of bush meat are taken from the Congo Basin.

The show concludes on BBC1 tonight at 19:30 BST with a programme depicting the BBC Wildlife Fund at work in Kenya.

So far the series has raised over £1 million for the fund which helps to protect the world's wildlife.

Bernard Mercer, chair of the BBC Wildlife Fund, said: "This is a great start for the… fund which plans to fund wildlife conservation projects in the UK and overseas and we're very grateful for the generosity of the public who have donated so far."


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