Dian Fossey

From New World Encyclopedia



Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 – December 26, 1985) was an American ethologist interested in gorillas. She completed an extended study of several gorilla groups, observing them daily for years in the mountain forests of Rwanda. Initially encouraged to work there by famous paleontologist Louis Leakey, her work is somewhat similar to Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees.

Early years

Dian Fossey was born in Fairfax, California, and her parents separated when she was young because of her Father's drinking and problems with the law. He mother forbade contact with him although he tried to be in touch with her many times and remarried Richard Price. Dian's interest in animals were put on hold by his strict disciplinary approach to child rearing. She was not allowed to eat at the table with her mother and step-father until she was over ten years old and as he thought, able to respect the manners necessary at the table. She grew up in San Francisco, California, where she attended Lowell High School. At 19, her love affair with animals could blossom when she worked as a ranch had at a dude ranch in Montana. She originally studied veterinary medicine at University of California at Davis, but had difficulty with the "hard" sciences such as chemistry and Physics and switched and earned her bachelor's degree in occupational therapy from San Jose State College (currently known as San Jose State University) in 1954.

She accepted a job as the Director of Occupational Therapy at Kosair Children's Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, and loved working with the poor country children as she lived in a run down cottage on a farm. In Louisville she met Franz Forester, a somewhat wealthy Rhodesian with whom she remained involved with on and off throughout her life and who offered her a trip to Africa. She was fascinated with the thought of a place where animals could roam free, and although she didn't accept his invitation, she began saving money to visit Africa in 1957. She also began to prepare particularly by reading "The Year of the Gorilla" by zoologist George Schaller. This was the beginning of her interest in the rare mountain gorillas. In Louisville she also became intimately involved with Father Raymond, and Irish priest that unknowingly helped her convert to Roman Catholicism, a conversion that waned over time.

Career

In 1963, she finally had secured $5,000 to finance her trip through motgaging her income at an expensive interest of 24%. Dian was in so many ways an unlikely candidate to do wild research in Africa, her life-long bout with allergies included. She packed all the allergy medications possible to help her while there. In Africa, her meeting with Dr. Louis Leakey was memorable. He was in the midst of important work on a giraffe fossil, and was much too busy to show his dig around for a tourist. Somehow he was convinced to take fourteen shillings from Ms. Fossey to show her around. She managed to fall into the pit, sprain her ankle, damage the fossil and vomit on it. From these inauspicious beginnings she managed to get a job researching gorillas. Two weeks later, on her bad foot, she was scrambling up a 10,000 foot volcano for the first contact with the mountain gorilla that would become her life's work.

She returned to Kentucky, and wrote some articles for the Louisville Courier-Journal about her experiences with the gorillas of the Virunga. When Dr. Leakey stopped to visit her while on a speaking tour, he convinced her to return in 1966 and she interned with Jane Goodallin Gombe. In 1967, she started on the Congo side of the Virunga Mountains, was captured by soldiers and escaped founded before she established the Karisoke Research Center, in a remote rainforest camp nestled in the Rwanda side of the mountains. Although she obtained no permit, nor told any official of her camp and studies with the gorilla in Rwanda, if there had not been a problem with poaching it is possible she could have maintained her camp.

When her photograph, shot by Bob Campbell, appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in January 1970, Dian Fossey became an international celebrity on saving mountain gorillas from probable extinction. There were only 480 in the wild at that time.

Her supporters convinced her to take time away and she attended the University of Cambridge, where she received a Ph.D. in zoology in 1974.

She had many detailed observations about gorilla life, and she drew sustenance from that. One gorilla she named Digit put his arm around at a time she had been depressed. When in 1978 he was brutally murdered, she armed herself and her staff with weapons, and instructed them to use them. She killed cattle that wandered onto her research site. She spread stories among the natives that she was a witch woman who would curse them and rumors began that she tortured them as well. She had declared a war. Many outside Africa began to wonder if she was insane.

Her supporters once again convinced her to accept a three year job teaching and writing at Cornell University in 1979 and there she wrote the book "Gorillas in the Mist" for which she would be most remembered.

Tragedy

Fossey returned in ill health, and to her gorillas that faced extinction. She was found brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on December 26, 1985. Her face and skull had been split, presumably by a native panga, a tool widely used by poachers. It is a pity she could not see the survey that would show the mountain gorilla population once again was growing that came out just four years later. Current evidence suggests that her murder was masterminded by Protais Zigiranyirazo, former Governor of Ruhengeri, who is also known for his creation of the death squads that resulted in the deaths of over 800,000 Rwandans in 1994. [citation needed][[1]]

Dian Fossey is interred at a site in Rwanda that Fossey herself had constructed for her dead gorilla friends. Her gravestone reads "No one loved gorillas more."

Legacy

Although she wrote over thirty scientific papers, Gorillas in the Mist remains her primary legacy. It is both a description of her scientific research and an insightful memoir of how Dian came to study gorillas in Africa. Portions of her life story were later adapted as a film Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey. Her brutal death combined with the emotional impact and pervasive influence of popular film forever sealed these images in the collective consciousness of the twentieth century.

The written work covers her scientific career in much greater detail, and omits some material on her personal life, such as her affair with photographer Bob Campbell (which formed a major subplot of the movie). Farley Mowat's Woman in the Mists was the first booklength biography of Dian Fossey, and serves as a useful counterweight to the dramatizations of the movie and the focus on gorillas in her own work.

She is the first known person to be voluntarily contacted by the mountain gorilla, when Peanuts touched her hand and was recorded in photographs by Bob Campbell. She was a virtual Fay Wraye with a type of "King Kong." Once again, she stunningly captured the imagination of the public.

She credibly defended the case for animal consciousness in a time when this was completely discounted. Her rigorous study and notes combined with keen analytical skill changed the way we look at animals forever.

Dr Fossey developed techniques with just the right mix of aversion and aggression unique to the mountain gorilla that enabled her to be accepted as an observer by the mountain gorillas. It took her a long time to develop the proper gorilla etiquette and she crawled up to them originally on her hands and kness. She would come too close, and they would respond in fear or anger. She discerned and recorded the social hierarchy and how it was proper to behave with each role. Fossey discovered and publicized their peaceful nature and their nurturing family relationships.

Dr. Fossey observed and utilized a wide range of vocalizations of the gorilla, and the reasearch continues through the DFGFI and their website has a link with such vocalizations.

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGFI)has funding from the United States congress and manages the Karisoke Research Center's programs, including training and maintaining tracking and anti-poaching patrols, monitoring and protecting the mountain gorillas residing Rwanda's Parc National des Volcans, and providing public information about the wild mountain gorilla.

Although a lucrative tourist program to view the gorillas has been started, it is notable that it was shut down for a period in 1999 because of killings of the tourists.

A book published in 2005 by National Geographic in the United States and Palazzo Editions in the United Kingdom as No One Loved Gorillas More, written by Camilla de la Bedoyere, features Dian's story told through the letters she wrote to her family and friends. The book is published to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of her death, and includes many previously unpublished photographs by Bob Campbell.

Set to premiere in the spring of 2006, the Kentucky Opera Visions Program, in Louisville, has written an opera about Dian Fossey.

Unification Aspects

The family is said to be the school of love, and for Dian Fossey it seems that she had to extend the term "family" to be able to access the elements of intimate relationship necessary to graduate from that school.

She did not maintain contact with her human family, as they did not really nurture her spirit or calling and she did not maintain conventional intimate contact with any human or human family continuously throughout her life. The gorilla became her family. Unfortunately, she needed the skills acquired in the human world to protect her gorilla family and prevent her own untimely demise. She has become a role model for those who believe aggression is ethical in extreme cases such as the potential extinction of the mountain gorilla.

She is a mythical figure indeed. She went where women especially did not go, she braved incredible hardship and situations with superior determination. She had keen intellectual ability and a very inquisitive mind. She faced great brutality. It is unfortunate that somehow she couldn't have formed a more productive collaboration that could have helped her significantly with the skills and contacts necessary to face such evil.

She thought about God, but it was ephemeral thus relinquished another great source of comfort and support.

Perhaps her unique combination of talents were necessary to face the awful situations she did. How unfortunate that there was no human figure she could rely upon to help her more. In the Unificationist view, she was a Cain type figure to the Abel type figure that Jane Goodall provided. (see Jane Goodall)

We all stand in a succession of Cain- Abel relationships. Obviously, Dr. Fossey was an Abel type figure to the poachers, perhaps to various governmental figures. But she failed to utilize methods that could elicit help. She could have become part of the government efforts in Rwanda through gaining support from key officials, she could have shown them the economic development possible through the tourist trade that would ensue.

Dr. Goodall did not face the extreme evil that Dr. Fossey did. Perhaps had their partnership become deeper and more meaningful, a legacy of so much more information could have ensued.Perhaps more inspiration could have gone toward methods of cooperation in environmental concerns rather that in eco-terrorist modes of operation.

It is not only Dr. Fossey's demise that is the tragedy, it is that those who espouse violence as an ethical modus operendi use her example to continue to support the continuance of the cycle of violence.

External links

 Fossey, D. Gorillas in the Mist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 
  ISBN 0-618-08360-x
 Mowat, F. Woman in the Mists. New York: Warner Books, c1987. 
  ISBN 0-446-38770-7

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