#gorrillas

What the fuck are people showing Gorrillas that it's freaking them out so bad? Porn? Gore? I don't think just showing them themselves would harm them like that.

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

Beginning in the days of famed primatologist Dian Fosse, when poaching was the greatest threat facing mountain gorillas, the naming of baby mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park was an academic affair. Once a year park rangers would gather around a campfire and select a name based on the baby’s nose print, its family, emerging personality, and current events. That personal identifier would be added to Fosse’s Karisoke Research Center database to help monitor and track gorilla populations.

It was an intimate event, little known outside ranger circles, until a humble request for snack money transformed this simple naming ceremony into an international phenomenon that at its core is still distinctly Rwandese.

Rosette Chantal Rugamba, who I met while waiting in line at Kwita Izina, tells me she remembers the request well. She was serving as the head of Office of Rwanda Tourism and National Parks in 2003 when a budget application crossed her desk for a “fun evening of naming.”

“I was instantly intrigued,” she recalled recently during a follow-up video interview. “I asked them, am I invited? And they said no, it is a park thing. It is very private and scientific. And I said, is anybody invited? They said no. And I said how long have you been doing it? They said, for a very long time. I said, and nobody comes? And they said no, it is just a park thing.”

“And I thought, this is the best news I’ve heard.”

It was less than a decade after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a brutal time when the mountain gorillas’ habitat straddling Uganda, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of Congo became a battleground. Wildlife rangers themselves became targeted and killed, and Karisoke was destroyed. During the genocide poachers aggressively targeted mountain gorillas. Because mountain gorillas travel in tightly knit families, poachers wanting to steal a baby gorilla often had to kill the entire family. So many were killed that their status on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ Red List of Threatened Species fell from endangered to critically endangered.

In the years that followed, aggressive anti-poaching and protection efforts had led to a slow increase in the gorilla population. In combination with successful ecotourism efforts, poaching was virtually eliminated. Several former poachers were hired as trackers to lead tourists to habituated mountain gorilla families.

By the time the request for funds crossed Rugamba’s desk in 2003, she saw the informal naming ceremony as evidence that enough new babies were being born and populations were again increasing. It was, she believed, cause for celebration.

“It was a conservation success. When a gorilla is born that means something is going right for this highly endangered national species,” Rugamba says. “But we also knew that if we wanted to continue to succeed in conservation, we needed to realize that our success was a fragile success. We are privileged to be the custodian of these wonderful creatures, but they belong to the world.”

Working with the country’s tourism board, the president’s office, communities surrounding the park and the rangers themselves, Rugamba and her team decided to reframe the event. Much to the bemusement of the rangers, it took nearly two years to plan a ceremony fit for the country’s highest-level officials. The first public gathering was held in 2005, when the area outside the park lacked basic infrastructure like hotels and restaurants. To compensate for this, the government implemented the Tourism Revenue Share Fund, which directed 10% of the country’s park revenues to go back to the communities near each national park to help support economic development.