4 ideas
Digit, a young silverback in Group 4 whom Fossey had observed for about a decade, was killed by poachers on December 31, 1977, while defending his group; his head and hands were cut off for sale. Fossey, an American outsider working in Rwanda, responded by founding the Digit Fund and escalating to armed anti-poaching patrols and confrontations with poachers, which alienated Rwandan officials and other conservationists.
Fossey got wild gorillas to accept a human observer by imitating their own signals rather than hiding or pushing closer. She knuckle-walked, pretended to feed on wild celery, made contentment belch-vocalizations, and avoided direct eye contact. This told the gorillas she was not a threat. Their tolerance grew over years until the first voluntary touch, from a young male named Peanuts in 1970, and that access made close-range individual study possible.
Fossey argued that endangered animals are saved by direct protection on the ground: patrols that cut snares, remove cattle from the park, and stop poachers. Tourism revenue, education programs, and development schemes run from far away do not do that work. She called those approaches 'theoretical conservation' because they spend money and attention while the animals keep dying in traps. On this view the immediate threat has to be stopped before long-term incentive programs can matter.
Fossey documented silverback males from other groups killing unweaned infants. Losing an infant ends a mother's lactation, so she can conceive sooner, and she often transfers to the group of the male who killed it. Infanticide therefore works as a reproductive strategy, and it changes how gorilla groups form.