The murder of gorilla researcher Dian Fossey |
Pioneering primatologist Dian Fossey destroyed the myth of gorillas as savage brutes before being killed by human hands, 40 years ago this month.
Dian Fossey was not the most obvious choice to lead the largest and most detailed study to date of mountain gorillas. For a start, she was not a trained zoologist but an occupational therapist. She also suffered from the lung disease emphysema and had a fear of heights, neither of which were ideal for working in thin air on remote mountain slopes. But what she lacked in expertise, she made up for in determination and a deep love of animals. When she moved in 1967, aged 35, from the US to the mountains of Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park, she set up the Karisoke Research Centre. It did not take long for her to realise the gorillas there were in serious danger. Their habitat was shrinking and poachers posed a growing threat. Fossey's relationship with the creatures would go far beyond observation. She would fight to save them from extinction.
Fossey had first visited Africa in 1963, where she met the renowned Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist Professor Louis Leakey. Having established that the origins of human life began in Africa, Leakey believed that observing primates in their natural habitats was the key to understanding human evolution. He had already helped another female researcher, Jane Goodall, to set up long-term studies of chimpanzees and wanted to do something similar for gorillas. His theory was that women with no scientific training were best suited for studying apes as, he believed, according to a 1986 Vanity Fair profile on Fossey, that they would be "unbiased about the behaviour" they witnessed, less threatening than a man but also "tougher and more tenacious". At the time, little was known about gorillas.
Were they really violent brutes as depicted in films such as King Kong?
Fossey's early research demanded patience. To gain the gorillas' trust, she began to mimic their behaviour. She told the BBC's Woman's Hour in 1984: "I'm an inhibited person, and I felt that the gorillas were somewhat inhibited as well. So I imitated their natural, normal behaviour like feeding, munching on celery stalks or scratching myself." She had to learn her lessons quickly. "I made a mistake chest-beating in the beginning… because by chest-beating I was telling the gorillas I was alarmed, as they were telling me they were alarmed when they chest-beat." Instead, she learned to imitate their belch-like "contentment sounds". Demonstrating how she would make a noise like a gorilla, she added: "Wouldn't it be nice if humans could go through life belch vocalising instead of arguing?"
Fossey learned to communicate with gorillas by never standing taller than them: "When I approach a group, I do approach it knuckle-walking, as gorillas walk, so that I will be at their level. I don't think it's quite fair to them. After all, I am 6ft tall as well. But to be standing up, they don't know if you're going to attack or run after them or what." After years of gaining the confidence of the gorillas, she had habituated them to her presence, and they allowed her to sit alongside them without any concern. She had destroyed the myth of gorillas as being violent creatures.
In 1979, the wider world witnessed Fossey's habituation work in practice via David Attenborough's groundbreaking BBC natural history series Life on Earth. At the time, mountain gorillas were on the verge of extinction. His encounter with a gorilla family has since become one of the most famous sequences in television history. As he sits surrounded by these "gentle and placid creatures", in a soft tone he says: "There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know… We see the world in the same way that they do." He adds: "If ever there was a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature's world, it must be with the........