Dian Fossey

by Erin

Dian Fossey was a lady who loved animals. She was born in San Francisco in 1932, and she is famous for her work with Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda , Zaire and Uganda.

Dian was a lonely child. She started riding horses while attending Lowell High School.  She loved it so much that she joined the horse riding team. Dian Fossey studied pre-veterinary medicine at the University of California but got poor grades in chemistry and physics. She transferred to San Jose State and studied occupational therapy. Dian moved to Kentucky in 1955 and worked as an occupational therapist at Kosair Children’s Hospital.

Dian became interested in Africa through a friend. She really wanted to visit Africa, so in 1963 she took out a loan to go. Dian loved Africa, and her love of animals lead her to gorillas.  On this trip she also met Dr. Louis Leakey, an expert in the study of early humans.  Dian went back to Louisville, but she wanted to return to Africa someday.

Three years later Dian went to a lecture that Dr. Leakey gave at the University of Louisville. He was impressed with articles that she had written about her Africa trip, especially her article and pictures of mountain gorillas. Dr. Leakey believed that Dian was the person he was looking for to study the mountain gorillas. She moved to Rwanda, and National Geographic was one of the sponsors of the study. She only came back to the United States now and then.

Dian’s photograph was on the cover of National Geographic in January 1970. The story and photographs brought attention to her struggle to keep the mountain gorillas from becoming extinct. This publicity helped her teach people that gorillas were not as mean as they were in books and the movies.

Dian worked with gorillas for fifteen years and had many achievements. When a gorilla named Peanut touched her, it was the first time gorillas and man had friendly contact. She tried to stop two young gorillas from flying to a zoo because earlier that month twenty gorillas died on a trip to a zoo in Germany. After one of her favorite gorillas Digit, was killed by poachers, Dian started the Digit Fund for gorillas. She wrote a book titled “Gorillas in the Mist” which later became a movie that was released in September 1988.
 
She was killed in her cabin by Poachers on December 26, 1985. Her murder was never solved.  After her death the Digit Fund turned into the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. The Mountain Gorillas are much happier than before thanks to Dian Fossey!!! 

What I like about Dian Fossey is how much she cared for gorillas and understood them. Who wouldn’t look at gorillas, the greatest of great apes, differently after reading about her.

Sources
Freedman, Suzanne (1997), Dian Fossey Befriending the Gorillas. Austin, Texas Steck-Vaughn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dian_Fossey
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/fghij/fossey_dian.html
http://gorillafund.org/dian_fossey/