Dian
Fossey was born in San Francisco
on January 16, 1932. She
was very much interested in animals
since childhood. She went to the University
of Califonia to learn pre-veterinary
medicine, but was unable to finish
it because of the difficulty
in mastering courses in chemistry
and physics. Then, she switched her
major to occupational
therapy and
finally graduated from San
Jose State College in 1954.
Afterwards,
she worked at a children's
hospital in Kentucky for a
number of years. During this period,
she read and studied all about the
primates in Africa;
there was an American zoologist
named George B. Schaller whose works inspired
her to travel to Africa.
In central
Africa, she met British
anthropologist Lousi Leakey,
who helped her find a job studying mountain
gorillas. Although she did
not receive any formal training in animal
behavior or zoology, the
student of Leakey, Jane
Goodall, taught her the
methods of fieldwork and data collection
in a short period of time.
In
1967, she founded the Kariske
Research Center in Rwanda,
where she lived for at least 18 years
among a group of gorillas. During
that time, she gained a complete
trust from the gorillas so that
she could touch them by hand. Particularly,
she liked a young gorilla named "Digit";
while she watched him grow, she
learned a lot about the behavior
of mountain gorillas.
After a
few years, she found out that her
favorite gorilla, Digit, was killed
by some poachers. Because of this
unfortunate event, she made up her
mind to start a public campaign against
those poachers who killed gorillas.
At this time, National
Geographic magazine published
an article about her work and favorite
gorilla, Digit, and poaching problems.
This brought a lot of attention to
her cause of saving the mountain
gorillas from extinction and at the
same time she was able to convince
the people that the gorillas had
a peaceful nature and nurtured family
relationships unlike violent
and aggressive expressions seen
from the movies and some books. She
also supported the preservation of
natural habitat while she opposed
zoos, since capturing resulted
in killing their family members.
Furthermore, she was responsible
for the revision of an European Commuinty
project that transformed parkland
into pyrethrum farms.
In
1974, she received a Ph.D. in
zoology from Cambridge
University due to the
fieldwork with the gorillas. A few
years later, she got a
job from Cornell University,and then she
began to write a book, Gorillas
in the Mist. After she finished
her book, she went back to the Kariske
Research Center to do more
work on the gorillas.
On
December 26, 1985, unfortunately,
she was murdered but nobody knew
who killed her. Her
contribution to the world was
the formation of National
park to protect the gorillas
and their habitat and raising up
the awareness of poaching problems
happening in Africa.
Sources:
Fossey,Dian, 1983.
Gorillas in the Mist. Houghon Mifflin
Company Boston.
Matthews,Tom
L.,1949. Light Shining through the
Mist. National
Geographic Society Washington,D.C.
