Gorillas in the Mist : Dian Fossey

Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 – December 27, 1985) was an American Zoologist who completed an extended study of eight gorilla groups. She observed 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.

Life and career
Education and early career
Dian enrolled in a pre-veterinary course at the University of California, Davis after attending Lowell High School in San Francisco, going against the advice of her stepfather who wanted her to pursue business instead. She supported herself by working as a clerk at the White House Department Store, doing other clerking and laboratory work, and working as a machinist in a factory. Dian later transferred to San José State College (now San José State University) to study occupational therapy after having difficulty with chemistry and physics. She received her bachelor's degree in 1954. At that time, Dian also established herself as an equestrian.

Interest in Africa
Fossey became interested in mountain gorillas after reading a book on the subject by zoologist George Schaller. In Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, Fossey met Dr. Louis Leakey and his wife Mary, who were examining the area for hominid fossils. She briefly worked with them before traveling to Zaire with a broken ankle to encounter mountain gorillas. Enchanted after meeting the animals, Fossey returned to Kentucky and continued her work with children.

By 1966 Fossey had persuaded Dr. Leakey to let her carry out research on the mountain gorillas, and gained support from the National Geographic Society. She began her field study at Kabara, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), but by 1967, political upheaval forced her to move to Rwanda, which raised $30,000 for her to use.

Start of her work
In 1967, she founded the Karisoke Research Center, a remote rain-forest camp nestled in the Virunga Mountains in Ruhengeri province, Rwanda. When her photograph, taken by Bob Campbell, appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in January 1970, Fossey became an international celebrity, bringing massive publicity to her cause of saving the mountain gorilla from extinction, as well as convincing the general public that gorillas are not as bad as they are sometimes depicted in movies and books. Photographs showing the gorilla "Peanuts" touching Fossey's hand depicted the first recorded peaceful contact between a human being and a wild gorilla. Her extraordinary rapport with animals and her background as an occupational therapist brushed away the Hollywood "King Kong" myth of an aggressive, savage beast.

Fossey strongly supported "active conservation"—i.e., anti-poaching patrols and preservation of natural habitat—as opposed to "theoretical conservation," which includes the promotion of tourism. She was also strongly opposed to zoos, as the capture of individual animals all too often involves the killing of their family members. Many animals don't survive the transport, and the breeding rate and survival rate in zoos are often lower than in the wild. For example, in 1978, Fossey attempted to prevent the export of two young gorillas, Coco and Pucker, from Rwanda to the Cologne zoo. She learned that, during their capture, 20 adult gorillas had been killed. The two captives were given to Fossey by their captors for treatment of injuries suffered during capture and captivity. With considerable effort, she restored them to some approximation of health. They were shipped to Cologne, where they lived nine years in captivity, both dying in the same month. She viewed the holding of snakes in "prison" (zoos) for the entertainment of people as unethical. Fossey is responsible for the revision of a European Community project that converted parkland into pyrethrum farms. Thanks to her efforts, the park boundary was lowered from the 3000-meter line to the 2500-meter line.

Fossey's book Gorillas in the Mist was praised by Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Her book remains the best-selling book about gorillas of all time.

Death
Fossey was brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on December 26, 1985. Her skull had been split by a native panga, a tool widely used by poachers, which she had confiscated years earlier and hung as a decoration on the wall of her living room adjacent to her bedroom. Fossey was found dead beside her bed and 2 meters away from the hole in the cabin that was cut on the day of her murder. Despite the violent nature of the wound, there was relatively little blood in her bedroom, leading some to believe that she was killed before the head-wound was inflicted, as head wounds, even superficial ones, usually bleed profusely.

Farley Mowat's biography of Fossey, Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey proposes that it is unlikely that she was killed by poachers. Mowat suggests that she was killed by those who viewed her as an impediment to the touristic and financial exploitation of the gorillas. According to the book, which includes many of Fossey's own private letters, poachers would have been more likely to kill her in the forest, with little risk to themselves.

On the night of Fossey's murder, a metal sheathing from her bedroom was removed at the only place of the bedroom where it wouldn't have been obstructed by her furniture, which supports the case that the murder was committed by someone who was familiar with the cabin and her day-to-day activities. The sheathing of her cabin, which was normally securely locked at night, might also have been removed after the murder to make it appear as if the killing was the work of poachers. But according to Mowat it is unlikely that a stranger could have entered her cabin by cutting a hole, then going to her living-room to get the panga, while Fossey could have had enough time to escape. The cabin was in great disarray, with broken glass on the floor and tables and other furniture turned around. Fossey was found dead with her gun beside her, but the ammunition was of the wrong caliber and didn't fit the weapon. All of Fossey's valuables in the cabin, thousands of dollars in cash and travelers' checks, and photo equipment remained untouched—valuables a poor poacher would most likely have taken. At the same time, there are not clear explanations for the murder against Dian Fossey.

After Fossey's death, her entire staff, including Rwelekana, a tracker she had fired months before, was arrested. All but Rwelekana, who was later found dead in prison, supposedly having hanged himself, were released. Mowat proposes that Fossey was murdered by an African man she may have admitted inside her cabin but who was working for the very people who wanted her removed so the gorillas could be exploited as a tourist and entertainment attraction.

According to Linda Melvern in her book Conspiracy to Murder, Protais Zigiranyirazo, Rwanda's ex-president's brother-in-law, could also have been "implicated in the murder of Dian Fossey in 1985." Quoting Nick Gordon, author of a book about Fossey's death, "another reason why she might have been murdered is that she knew too much about the illegal trafficking by Rwanda's ruling clique." Protais Zigiranyirazo, who was the prefect of the Ruhengeri province (where Karisoke was located), also had strong financial interests in gorilla tourism.

Dian Fossey was portrayed by her detractors as eccentric and obsessed, and all kinds of stories were circulated about her. According to her letters, ORTPN, the World Wildlife Fund, African Wildlife Foundation, FPS, the Mountain Gorilla Project and some of her former students tried to wrest control of the Karisoke research center from her for the purpose of tourism, by portraying her as unstable. In her last two years Fossey claims not to have lost any gorillas to poachers; however the Mountain Gorilla Project, which was supposed to patrol the Mount Sabyinyo area, tried to cover up gorilla deaths caused by poaching and diseases transmitted through tourists. Nevertheless these organizations received most of the public donations[citation needed]. The public often believed their money would go to Fossey, who was struggling to finance her anti-poaching patrols, while organizations collecting in her name put it into costly tourism projects and as she put it "to pay the airfare of so called conservationists who will never go on anti-poaching patrols in their life".

Many of the organizations that opposed Fossey, including ORTPN (the Rwandan tourism office) and other wildlife organizations, used and continue to use her name for their own financial gain up to this day. Weeks before her death, ORTPN refused to renew her visa, and pressure on Fossey was mounting. However, Fossey managed to obtain a special two-year visa through Augustin Nduwayezu, a benevolent Secretary-General in charge of immigration. Mowat believes that the extension of her visa amounted to a de facto death warrant.

Months before her death, Fossey signed a one-million-dollar contract with Warner Bros. for a movie that was to be based on her book, Gorillas in the Mist. The prospect that her work would be funded far into the future may have contributed to her demise.
Fossey's will stated that all her money (including proceeds from the movie) should go to the Digit Fund to finance anti-poaching patrols. However, her mother, Kitty Price, challenged the will and won.

The director of ORTPN, Habirameye, who refused to renew Fossey's last visa request, insisted at the filming of Gorillas in the Mist that there should be as little about the death scene as possible.

Dian Fossey is interred at a site in Rwanda that she herself had constructed for her dead gorilla friends. She believed that all beings had the same rights and that they needed to be treated with the same respect as humans. She was buried in the gorilla graveyard next to Digit, who was killed and beheaded in 1978, and near many gorillas killed by poachers.

Legacy
After her death, Fossey's Digit Fund in the U.S. was renamed the "Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International". The Digit Fund in the UK, which Fossey lost to the Fauna Protection League (FPS), was also renamed after her as "The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund UK" (DFGF-UK). However she never received any funds collected in her name by the FPS; and although some conservationists associated with the FPS wanted her to be removed from Rwanda FPS and the DFGF-UK (which renamed itself "The Gorilla Organisation" in 2006) continue to use her name up to this day for their financial purposes (including promotion of tourism, which Dian opposed, and the financing of local bureaucrats).

One of Dian Fossey's friends Dr. Shirley McGreal continues to work for the protection of primates through the work of her International Primate Protection League (IPPL) one of the few wildlife organizations that according to Fossey effectively promote "active conservation."
For a year after Fossey's death, until the conviction of one of her students for her murder, poachers dared not enter the forest for fear of being captured and interrogated for her murder. Many believe that the student convicted of murdering Dian was just a scapegoat and that the evidence against him was contrived. Immediately after the conviction, in late 1986, poaching began to rise again. Elephants and leopards are now completely extinct in the Virungas.

After Fossey's death until the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Karisoke was directed by former students who had opposed her. During the genocide the camp was completely looted and destroyed.
Today only remnants remain of her cabin that was converted into a museum for tourists at the time. During the civil war the Virunga parks were filled with refugees and illegal logging destroyed vast areas.