Fosse’s early research required patience. In order to gain the gorilla’s trust, she began to imitate its behavior. She told the BBC’s Woman’s Hour in 1984: “I’m a restrained person, and I felt like gorillas were inhibited to some degree as well. So I imitated their natural, normal behavior, like eating food, munching on celery stalks, and scratching themselves.” She had to learn her lessons quickly. “At first, it was a mistake to beat my chest…I was telling the gorillas that I was alert, just as I was letting them know that I was alert.” Instead, she learned to imitate “satisfied sounds,” like a burp. Demonstrating how to make sounds like a gorilla, he added: “Wouldn’t it be nice if humans could go through life burping instead of arguing?”
The master learned how to communicate with gorillas by never standing taller than them. “When I approach the group, I walk on my knuckles so I’m at the same height as the gorillas. I don’t think that’s fair to them. After all, I’m six feet tall, too. But when you’re standing there, they can’t see you. I don’t know if it’s going to attack or chase or what.” After years of gaining the gorilla’s trust, she got the gorilla used to her presence and the gorilla allowed her to sit next to him without any concerns. She destroyed the myth that gorillas are violent creatures.
Attenborough and her encounter
In 1979, the Master’s habituation work was seen around the world in action through David Attenborough’s ground-breaking BBC Natural History series. life on earth. At that time, mountain gorillas were on the brink of extinction. Since then, his encounter with the gorilla family has become one of the most famous scenes in television history. As he sits surrounded by these “kind and gentle creatures,” he says in a soft tone: “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging glances with gorillas than with any other animal I know…we see the world the way they do.” He added, “If there is any possibility of escaping the human situation and living imaginatively in another creature’s world, it has to be the gorillas.”
In a 2007 BBC retrospective documentary Gorilla revisited Along with Sir David Attenborough, he admitted that he initially thought the plan to photograph animals to demonstrate the evolutionary advantage of opposable thumbs (allowing them to grip objects, including branches) was too ambitious. He said, “Mountain gorillas live on the Virunga volcano at an altitude of 3,000 meters and are notoriously difficult to approach.To get close to mountain gorillas, you have to carry all your photographic equipment and climb up a 45-degree slope to climb the dense jungle. “And the biggest problem is that it would have been impossible to photograph mountain gorillas without the help of my teacher, Diane, who is the only person in the world who studies mountain gorillas in the wild.” Ms Attenborough said that from what she had heard, there was no way she would have allowed a TV crew to accompany her. Life on Earth director John Sparks wrote her a convincing letter, and “we were all surprised that she wrote back a very nice letter saying, ‘You’re welcome.'”
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
