National Geographic: Dian Fossey (14 of 24)

National Geographic: Dian Fossey

Some of it involved castration, which she never did do to anybody, but sure did threaten.
A lot of it involved downright, she said, beating them with nettles, and hitting them with wires, and all kinds of things that are not designed to improve your relationship with the country in which you were trying to do your research work.
When you've only got a population of what it then was about 250 gorillas a small boom in business of dead, dead, dead gorillas is going to quickly wipe out a population.
And I have no doubt that if Dian had not acted as she did those gorillas would probably have gone.

Dian expected her research students to participate in the anti-poaching patrols.
Whether they agreed with her tactics or not.
Camp was her little kingdom, Karisoke was something that she had created and anybody and everybody who worked there as a student or as a fellow researcher was expected to, to do what they were told.
They lived under her authority uh, we did not feel as, as outsiders coming from the United States that we had the, the authority, the, the prerogative, to go out and arrest poachers to uh, be a vigilante force if you will.
Dian's treatment of captive poachers worried the researchers.
My concern at the time was that she was not the authority that had the right to deal with them.
Dian was insistent that she needed to speak with the poacher first.
I heard a good bit of yelling and shouting coming from the cabin.
I didn't want to be a part of it.
Saving gorillas from poachers traps became an obsession to Dian.
She frightened off intruders with Halloween masks.