Orphaned gorillas find safe haven

In a remote, rural area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund has opened the country’s first rehabilitation centre for Grauer’s gorillas.

Called GRACE (Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education), the centre’s goal is to teach orphaned gorillas how to survive in the wild as a new, self-sufficient “family,” with the longer-term goal to release them into a natural habitat in a neighbouring forest in the Congo Basin.

These young gorillas are physically and emotionally fragile, most having suffered from extremely traumatic conditions and experiences. Many have been violently taken from the forest by poachers, intent on selling them either as bush meat or for the animal trafficking trade.

CNN’s Jessica Ellis and Ferre Dollar recently followed the first group of gorillas to be transported to the forested area from a temporary facility in Goma, in eastern DRC.

The pioneering young orphans were airlifted to GRACE by a helicopter donated by MONUC, the United Nations peacekeeping force in the DRC — a first for a U N mission. Travelling by road would have been almost impossible due to poor infrastructure and potential trauma to the animals.

Mapendo, Amani, Kighoma and Ndjingala were all originally snatched from the forest and their families by poachers. They are all Grauer’s gorillas, a subspecies related to the Mountain gorilla, but live exclusively in eastern DRC.

Sandy Jones is the confiscated gorilla rehabilitation manager for the Dian Fossey Fund and now the manager of GRACE. “All of the gorilla species are endangered because Congo is so unexplored they have not done a real census on how many Grauer’s gorillas there are,” she says.

CNN