Collecting with a conscience

As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla the fascination of studying him begins to grow on you and you instinctively begin to speak of the gorilla as "he" in a human sense, for he is obviously as well as scientifically akin to man. - Carl Akeley

There are few places that I find as stimulating at the American Museum of Natural History, but the great halls of stuffed animals always put me in a somber mood. The organic parts of the reconstituted creatures were collected long ago, and large metal letters on the wooden frames telling the viewer who had donated the skins to the museum. The stuffed apes are particularly disturbing, as they stare out through their artificial boxes with lifeless eyes.

Every diorama tells a story, of a hunt or expedition undertaken when natural history still involved gathering specimens to ship back to museums. In many cases the reflections of the hunters on their collecting trips have been lost, but Carl Akeley, for whom the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH is named, described his thoughts on gorillas in a June 1922 article "Is the Gorilla Almost a Man?"

In 1921, Akeley traveled to what is now Uganda to collect gorillas for the AMNH, and he returned from the trip with the remains of five individuals (four adults and a baby). Yet this expedition was not the heroic journey to slay a powerful beast that had been popularized in fiction like The Gorilla Hunters; Akeley took care to observe the natural history of the apes. These animals were not the "hellish dream creatures" of Paul du Chaillu, who introduced the gorilla to Victorian England decades before, but more peaceful animals.

Even though science had largely dispensed with legendary monsters, a popular mythology still surrounded the gorilla. Few had seen it in the wild, and those who had (like du Chaillu) were sometimes prone to exaggeration and hyperbole. Even books that wanted to provide an accurate treatment to gorillas had failed, one common error being the belief that gorillas were primarily arboreal. Akeley saw for himself that this was not the case, and he even suggested that the terrestrial knuckle-walking of the gorillas was an indication that "They seem to be evolving toward a two-legged animal."

More than being curiosities in and of themselves, Akeley saw the gorillas as our nearest living relatives. They and other apes had diverged from a distant common ancestor (in-keeping with H.F. Osborn's desire to not have humans evolved from apes), but they were still startlingly like us. While incapable of human speech, Akeley underlined the proposal that gorillas were mentally akin to two-year-old human children and had all the proper mechanisms to allow them to speak. If they could do so, he reasoned, they would be living "missing links." Even though such a suggestion seemed fantastic, Akeley maintained that gorillas seemed to be an approximation of an early stage of our own evolution.

It might make sense to assume that this similarity might lead humans to protect gorillas, but as Darwin had predicted, the contrary was the case. Humans were extirpating gorillas at a rate that made Akeley worry about their continued survival. There was much to learn from the gorilla, both about its life and about ourselves, and Akeley feared that;

...unless some measures are quickly taken to get this information it will never be gotten. The gorilla is on his way to extinction. He is not particularly numerous. He is neither wary nor dangerous. He is an easy and highly prized prey to the "sporting" instinct.

What could be done to save them? A gorilla sanctuary delimited by natural boundaries seemed like the best solution;

As I traveled down from Mikeno toward the White Friar's Mission the fascinating possibilities of the study of the gorilla and its immense scientific importance filled my mind along with the fear that his extinction would come before adequate study was made. These considerations materially led my mind to the idea of a gorilla sanctuary; and I realized that a better place for such a thing than the one I had just left could hardly be hoped for. The three mountains, Mikeno, Karasimbi, and Visoke stand up in a triangle by themselves. Their peaks are about four miles apart. On the slopes of these mountains, in the bamboos and in the dense forest, there are several bands of gorillas. I judge that there are between fifty and one hundred animals altogether. In all probability the animals in this region stay on these three mountains.

In Akeley's view, gorillas were certainly approaching a low grade of humanity. Perhaps they were even re-playing some bit of our own evolution. (Indeed, there is a sense of evolution towards a goal in the piece.) It seems paradoxical that he cared so much for the animals while posing next to the severed head of one of the animals, but we should be careful not to let our distaste for the death of our relatives obscure Akeley's aims. In order for people to want to save the gorillas, they had to see them and understand them. For that to happen naturalists needed specimens, and perhaps the deaths of a few could provide the impetus to save the many.

Almost 90 years after Akeley collected the gorillas from Africa, the apes are still in trouble. Perhaps they would have been lost entirely if not for the conservation efforts undertaken since Akeley's time, but they are fortunately still here. There is no longer a need to ship them across oceans to academic institutions, dead or alive, but Akeley did not live at such a time. The gorilla diorama at the AMNH is still a macabre spectacle, but it speaks of a different time in science & conservation, and of collecting with a conscience.