What is gorilla habituation ?
The gorilla habituation refers to the process of taming mountain gorillas to get used to human beings through breaking the initial wild gorilla behaviors so as to create a positive human gorilla interaction or relationship . For a gorilla group to be visited by tourists, the family must first undergo the habitation exercise. This process always takes a period of 2 – 3 years to have a gorilla family fully habituated or to make them used to human beings so as to allow the free human gorilla interaction .In Bwindi the first gorilla family to be habituated is called Mubare gorilla family here in Bwindi and these family was sighted in 1991 and immediately the habitation exercise started and by 1993 the family was ready for visitors viewing and this family as existed up to date given the number of leadership transitions that the family has encountered since then .
To habituate a gorilla family is not an easy task as it requires a strong team of self motivated rangers and of good will and who are ready to give their best to have a family habituated since some time it may require the habitation team to go and camp deep inside the forest for a couple of days and nights .
Habituation exercise is done in phases
Identification of the family and its size. Understanding the size of a gorilla family is very important since this enables you to know the reasonable number of personal to deploy beside that knowing the family size helps in limiting risks for example families with fewer individuals, i.e., less than 5 members, stand a higher chance of splitting and they may end up disappearing one by one. Then also families with more than 15 members in most cases they are heterosexual and such families tend to take long without getting used to human beings , these kinds of families also tend to be so aggressive hence making it hard to habituate such families
Actually the process of habituation starts on . Immediately after understanding the family size the habituation team will Immediately start following the family , for the first 6 month of the exercise there is a high likelihood of the team spending their first 6 month without seeing any gorillas though they will keep following them this is because the animals are completely scared of human beings so they tend to run away as away of avoiding humans,
In this phase this is when there is now a very high level of interaction between humans and gorillas though it is more of aggressive interaction , this is because the animals now feel they are tired of being followed all the time so now they need to understand what’s going on so they will all the time be aggressive and keep on charging at humans whereby the can charge at humans and run away then after sometimes they come back and charge again . To the habituation team when the family starts charging at them , the experience or the Job gets more interesting to them since this gives them room to get exposed to the animals and the animals will be in position to see then hence giving them room to imitate them . This is usually when the experience is in between 6 month to 1 year .
After one year now in phase 4 their will be an increased Interaction between humans and the gorillas and it this time that the habituation team has to do a lot of imitation whereby they have to imitate a number of things which the different localizations that gorillas use while communicating to each other , gorillas are estimated to have got 14 different vocals that they use for communication , rangers are now in position to interpret and to imitate them ,we also pretend to feed on the vegetation just like the way the gorillas feed on the various plant leaves , bark and fruits this will help to attract the attention of the animals to feel and think that we are part of them
We also.imitate the gorillas as they chest beat . Babies, juveniles and subadult individuals during the resting time are often seen and hard chest beating since they take it as a game to them which is aimed at shoeing off their strength in a manner that the louder the chest beat the stringer the Individual so they are found of chest beating often and when we imitate the chest beats. Our chest beats are not loud as theirs and by so doing they start undermining us as weak individuals since we don’t have louder chest beats hence making the animals lose fear us Because they now feel we are too weak to fight them.
We also pretend to walk like them . All this helps us in attracting the attention of the animals hence a positive relationship between human beings and gorillas. After 1 and half years the relationship starts to build then now tourists can be allowed to come and take part in this exercise because these animals are very curious animals so the moment you introduce something new to them they puck interest and get attracted to it . So introducing tourists is purposely to attract the attention of the animals since the light skin of the tourists appears new and unique to the animals, most of the cases we have observed most individuals when tourists are viewing they tend to move towards the tourists hence losing fear for the humans.
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