The fact that should astonish most of us about "Gorillas," a two-hour-long documentary to be aired next Sunday on the A&E network, is not that the apes in question are such nice, gentle creatures, but that the people who study and protect them today are so nice and gentle too.

Like most laymen, my understanding of the gorilla world has depended mainly on the image of Dian Fossey, a complex and, it turned out, rather ghastly woman who founded a gorilla reserve in the highlands of Rwanda and did more to bring those...