Dian Fossey

             Dian Fossey is known as the world’s leading authority on the physiology and behavior of mountain gorillas. She dedicated her life to the study and preservation of these animals. Her writing portrays gorillas as dignified, highly social, “gentle giants,” with individual personalities and strong family relationships.

Fossey was born in 1932 in San Francisco, California and endured a difficult childhood. Her parents divorced when Dian was three and her mother remarried two years later. Her stepfather treated Dian badly, insisting she eat in the kitchen with the housekeeper until she was ten and contributing little money for Dian’s education. Because her college science grades were too low to enter veterinary school, she became an occupational therapist and worked at a children’s hospital where she had a special ability to communicate with the disabled children.

            In 1963, Dian Fossey took a trip to eastern Africa where she met Louis Leakey, an anthropologist, who persuaded her to return to Africa in 1966 to study the mountain gorilla in its natural habitat. She writes about her first glimpse of the gorilla in her book, Gorillas in the Mist,

            “Peeking through the vegetation, we could distinguish an equally curious

            [band] of black, leather-countenanced, furry-headed primates peering

back at us. Their bright eyes darted nervously from under heavy brows as

 though trying to identify us as familiar friends or possible foes.

 Immediately I was struck by the physical magnificence of the huge jet-

black bodies blended against the green palette wash of the thick forest foliage.”

            Fossey’s patience allowed the Rwandan gorillas to get used to her presence. She carefully eased her way into their lives, approaching them on hands and knees and trying to say in gorilla etiquette “I am here and I am harmless.” This worked well, but took time. Pushing the gorillas too hard could cause them to respond in fear. As time went on, Fossey began to find just the right mix of aggressiveness and shyness necessary to get close to the animals without frightening them. As she was sitting among them one day, a young male named Peanuts came over and touched her. She was the first person to have voluntary contact with a gorilla.

            Her acute observation skills allowed Fossey to record the life of a mountain gorilla in detail. The group is usually a tightly-knit family consisting of an adult male leader, his adult brother, or nephew, and a few adult females and their children. They move and feed together, rarely separated by more than a hundred feet. The children are treated very tenderly by even the largest of males. Gorilla families rarely interact with other neighboring groups except to occasionally transfer maturing females back and forth. Sometimes the exchange is not voluntary. A silverback may “raid” a neighboring family to obtain females.

            When Dian Fossey arrived in Africa in 1966, there were an estimated 480 mountain gorillas left in the wild. It became her personal mission to save the animals she studied and grew to love. The mountain gorilla was being pushed out of its habitat by human population growth. This was a land where animals were valued mostly as food or skins. Poachers were trapping the creatures, often killing an entire group to capture one baby. They killed them for trophies. Gorilla heads made unusual hat racks. The hands could be used for ashtrays.

When Digit, Uncle Bert and Macho, three of her favorite gorillas, were brutally murdered, Fossey declared war on poachers. She organized anti-poaching patrols and placed bounties on poachers’ heads. She killed their cattle if it strayed onto parkland. She burned their houses. She even circulated stories that she was a sorceress with the ability to curse her enemies. Fossey was found murdered in her cabin on December 26, 1985. She was buried in the cemetery next to her beloved gorillas. Her killer, probably a poacher, was never found.

            Was Fossey right to take the anti-poaching campaign into her own hands? Her critics argue that she was too close to the gorillas, too emotionally involved with them to be a good conservationist. Certainly the gorilla population is under threat even today, though a successful program of gorilla tourism has done much in recent years to improve Rwanda’s policy toward the great apes’ conservation.

            One thing is certain however. As it says on the marker at Dian Fossey’s grave:

Dian Fossey        1932 – 1985

No one loved gorillas more…