Ivan was a western lowland gorilla born in 1962 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was captured from the wild as a baby and brought to live with humans. For the first few years of his life he lived with his owners, but he soon grew too big for a human house and they moved him to a 14' x 14' concrete enclosure on display to the public at the B&I shopping center in Tacoma, Washington, where he spent the next 27 years of his life.