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Heaven Has Another Angel In’t
With love and great respect, on the passing of (Dame) Jane Goodall
Growing up in the north of England during the ’70s and ’80s, female role models seemed a little light on the ground. But I always loved animals and was always interested in conservation projects and research studies being done in the wild. As I became increasingly involved in first the WWF, then the Born Free Foundation — along with other groups like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and domestic rescue charities here in the UK — I began to realise there were actually some amazing female role models I looked up to, like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Joy Adamson and Virginia McKenna.
In 1985, my teen heart broke when Dian Fossey, an American primatologist and conservationist, was murdered/assassinated in the Virunga Mountains, Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda. Fossey is probably best known for her book Gorillas in the Mist and the film adapted from it in 1988, which is her account of studying mountain gorillas at the Karisoke Research Centre, where she was based for twenty years, from 1966 until her death. She is buried at Karisoke, in the gravesite she constructed for ‘Digit’ and all of her other gorilla friends who were slaughtered by poachers.
Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas were the group of three female research…
