Since 1975 the owner of the mall and of Ivan, Ron Irwin, has resisted the pressure by animal rights advocates to turn the gorilla over to a zoo, saying that the stress of moving could kill him.

"He's probably the healthiest gorilla in America," Mr. Irwin said recently. "Moving him across the country would kill him. Nobody seems to care about that."

But Mr. Irwin said this week that he thought it might now be in the best interest of Ivan as well as the mall to let him go to a zoo. "It's time," he said, adding that he would meet with gorilla experts to discuss Ivan's future.

The problem is that the Tacoma zoo and others in the area do not have a place for him. It has been zoos farther away, including the Bronx Zoo and zoos in Dallas, Atlanta and Washington, that have expressed interest in Ivan, who, as a western lowland gorilla, is a member of an endangered species. Now 29 years old and at gorilla mid-life, Ivan is in good physical shape, they say, and could breed with female lowland gorillas in captivity.

"We will never be able to take another gorilla out of the wild," said David Towne, director of the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. "So his contribution as a wild gorilla is significant to the gene pool." Captured in 1964