FAST FACTS
Stage: Dian Fossey found murdered
Date: December 27, 1985
Where: Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda
WHO: The killer remains unknown
In late December 1985, a worker opened the door to a remote hut in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda and was confronted with a horrifying scene: gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, whose aggressive approach to conservation had pitted her against the local community, had been hacked to death with a machete and her hut had been ransacked.
Fossey has worked with the critically endangered gorilla population in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park since the late 1960s. Together with Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas, she was one of three “trimates” chosen by Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural habitat.
When Fossey went to Africa, she had no formal training in ethology, the science of animal behavior. She began her fieldwork in Cabaret, Congo, living in a tiny tent and venturing out to study mountain gorillas (Gorilla Beringay Beringay) there. After civil war broke out in 1967, she fled to the Rwandan part of the mountains and set up a new research project near Mount Karisimbi in Rwanda.
Fossey was inspired by the work of George Schaller, a biologist who also studied gorillas in the Virunga Mountains in 1959.
“I knew that animals try to stay away from you. If you approach them quietly, they will accept your presence. That's what I did with the gorillas. I just approached them day after day, which was quite easy because they form close-knit social groups. I soon got to know them as people, both their faces and their behavior, and I just sat and watched them,” Schaller said in an interview. interview 2006.
Fossey operated on the same principle of patient and unobtrusive observation. However, the gorillas initially ran away from her, and she spent hours tracking them through the misty forest.
After a year, they stopped running away in her presence and began beating their chests and vocalizing. It was a bluff designed to scare her, but it was still far from their normal, natural behavior, she said in an interview. 1973 lecture. Two years later she received two young gorillas, Koko and Packer; rehabilitated them; and learned about young gorillas by observing them.
“I learned the gorillas' need for love and affection, as well as the young gorillas' need for constant play,” she said.
She said it would be three years before the gorillas accepted her presence and displayed more naturalistic behavior.
During his decades in Virunga, Fossi described and learned to imitate the vocalizations of gorillasincluding “burp” signifying satisfaction. She also spoke about their close-knit family structure. courtship and mating ritualsand also documented accidental killing of baby gorillas competing males.
Although she eventually received a PhD in zoology from the University of Cambridge, Fossey spent her early years studying gorillas without any formal training. Perhaps because of her initial lack of training, she formed close bonds with individual animals and tended to attribute more human motives and descriptions to their actions than is usually accepted in formal zoology. She often described gorillas as more altruistic than humans.
“You take these beautiful, regal animals,” she told an interviewer, according to the publication New York Times. “How many fathers have the same sense of fatherhood? How many human mothers are more nurturing? The family structure is incredibly strong.”
She developed a particularly close bond with a gorilla she nicknamed Digit. named after a damaged finger – who had no playmates his age. Digit was killed by poachers in 1977.
In the last years of his life, Fossey increasingly focused on preserving the dwindling gorilla habitat and combating poaching. According to police, she used confrontational methods such as burning traps, wearing masks to deter poachers, and spray-painting cattle to prevent herders from bringing them into the national park. Dian Fossey Gorilla Foundation.
She also shot over the heads of tourists to scare them away and told her graduate students to carry guns. according to the Washington Post newspaper.
Considering that many people living on the outskirts of the park lived in poverty and resorted to expansionism and ranching to survive, this did not earn her goodwill with many of the locals.
Fossey's murder was never solved. Many believe that poachers are to blame for the murder, but others theories have also been expressed.
