The mysterious murder of gorilla researcher Dian Fossey

Fossey’s early research required patience. To gain the gorillas’ trust, she began imitating their behavior. “I’m an inhibited person, and I felt that the gorilla was somewhat inhibited as well,” she told the BBC’s Woman’s Hour program in 1984. So I imitated her natural, normal behavior like suckling, chewing celery stalks, or scratching myself. She had to learn her lessons quickly. “I made the mistake of chest-beating at first… because I was telling the gorillas by chest-beating that I was feeling uncomfortable, and they were telling me that they were panicking when they chest-beat.” Instead, she learned to imitate belching-like “satisfaction sounds.” Explaining how she can make a sound like a gorilla, she added: “Wouldn’t it be nice if humans could live life belching noises instead of arguing?”

Fossey learned to communicate with the gorillas by never standing taller than them: “When I approach a group, I approach it knuckle-walking, the way gorillas walk, so that I’m at their level. I don’t think it’s completely fair to them. After all, I’m 6 feet tall, too. But for you to stand up, they don’t know whether you’re going to attack them or run after them or what.” After years of gaining the gorillas’ trust, they became accustomed to her presence, and allowed her to sit next to them without any worry. It has destroyed the myth of gorillas as violent creatures.

Attenborough’s meeting with her

In 1979, the wider world saw Fossey’s work on land habituation through David Attenborough’s pioneering BBC natural history series Life on Earth. At that time, mountain gorillas were on the verge of extinction. His encounter with the gorilla family has since become one of the most famous series in television history. As he sat surrounded by these “gentle, quiet creatures,” he said in a soft tone: “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know… We see the world the same way they do.” He adds: “If there is a possibility to escape the human condition and live imaginatively in the world of another creature, it must be with gorillas.”

In the 2007 BBC retrospective documentary, Gorillas Revisited with Sir David Attenborough, he admitted that he initially thought the plan to film the animals to show off their evolutionary advantage of opposable thumbs (allowing them to grip objects, including branches, securely) was too ambitious. “Mountain gorillas live at 3,000 metres, in the Virunga volcanoes, and are difficult to get close to,” he said. “Getting to them meant carrying all our camera equipment up 45-degree slopes through dense jungle. Most problematic of all, there was no way we could have photographed them without the help of Dian Fossey – the only person in the world who has been studying them in the wild.” Attenborough said that from what he heard, there was no way she would let a TV crew join her. The director of Life on Earth, John Sparks, wrote her a persuasive letter, but “to all of our surprise she wrote back with a very kind letter saying, ‘You’re welcome.’”