Animal instincts
Ruth Keesling’s caring comes naturally
By Steve Poehler

Ruth Keesling cradles a young orangutan at a wild-animal orphanage in Borneo in 1998.

Attached to the front door, a small carving of a gorilla and her baby greets visitors to the Englewood home of Ruth Keesling (‘53).

Inside Keesling’s office, carved gorillas sit on bookshelves. Paintings and pictures of tigers and gorillas adorn the walls. Boxes full of gorilla photos and slides are stacked almost 5 feet high in one corner, and an additional 180,000 pictures are stored downstairs, Keesling says.

A trip down a narrow, winding staircase and through a door reveals two caged parrots chattering near an indoor pool, with plants and native artifacts scattered throughout the room. Large statues of animals, including a gorilla and an elephant, loom in the backyard.

“This is home,” says Keesling, 72.

Growing up in Edison, N.J., Keesling, then Ruth Morris, lived in an apartment above her father’s small animal hospital.

Each evening after school, young Ruth would make a trip downstairs to help her father with the sick animals that were brought in for treatment. While her father worked on the animals, she took notes.

“That got me into learning how to get details down,” Keesling says.

Keesling’s family had always been familiar with Colorado. Deciding to attend CU was an easy choice, she says.

Keesling’s father predicted she would become the “Betty Crocker of the dog world,” she said, but she wanted to study journalism and home economics. So she majored in home economics with a minor in journalism.

She ran into a slight problem, however, because a home economics major had to take pre-med classes, where she didn’t fare too well.

“I flunked them all,” Keesling says. After the end of her sophomore year, her grade-point average was hovering uncomfortably below 1.0. “So I said, ‘Well, this is not going to last.’ That’s when I went to straight journalism.”

She scrambled to make up for the lost time, attending two summer schools in order to graduate just a semester late – in January 1953. In the meantime, she worked as an editor for Silver & Gold, CU’s newspaper at the time, as well as becoming a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority and a Pacesetter.

Largely because of a journalism teacher named Maurice Frink, Keesling says, she was able to make a complete turnaround and was nominated to graduate magna cum laude.

“He was great,” Keesling says. “He was the best teacher I have ever had. I learned the most from him than I’ve ever learned from any teacher anywhere.”

Her original graduating class of 1952 was set to celebrate its 50th reunion May 9-11 on the CU campus. Keesling was scheduled to throw a cocktail and dinner party May 8 at her Englewood home to celebrate.

Even after 50 years, Keesling says, she has been able to keep in touch with many members of her sorority and classmates.

“The group that we had in Boulder has been friends all these years,” says Keesling, who helped fund the sorority’s expansion during the 1960s. “And we talk to each other on the phone a lot.”

Ruth Keesling, in white blouse, stands next to Rwandan President Paul Kigame at a 2000 meeting of a task force that the government of Rwanda assembled to explore problems related to gorilla survival in that nation. Also pictured are Dr. Cheogene Rudasingwa, director of Rwanda's cabinet, in dark suit, and wildife veterinarians.

After graduation, she worked as a reporter for two newspapers in California before her father intervened.

Working for the newspapers “was fun, but then my father determined that I was going to work for him,” Keesling says.

For the next 35 years, she wrote brochures and helped train college veterinarians. She also worked to build the Morris Animal Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to solving health problems in companion animals and wildlife.

Founded in 1948 by Keesling’s father, the foundation claims to be the largest nongovernmental animal health organization in the world.

After living in San Francisco, Topeka, Kan., and New York, Keesling moved with an old college friend to Aurora, where the two rented a house while Keesling worked for a public relations firm.

During her stay in Aurora, she met her future husband, Tom Keesling, at a party. The couple was engaged four months later and married in 1956, having three boys and eventually five grandchildren.

“Ruth is, of course, not only my wife but my best friend,” Tom Keesling says. “She is motivated and dedicated to achieve her goals. She has also been able to be a wonderful mother and motivator for our children.”

In 1959, Ruth and Tom Keesling opened Travel Associates Inc., a company that specializes in international travel and tourism while also working on environmental causes.

With their company, the Keeslings helped open communist China to capitalism during the 1970s.

“That was a very interesting experience to see China go from pure communism to capitalism,” says Ruth Keesling, who was named an outstanding alumnus in 1976 by CU.

Keesling estimates she has now been to every country in the world “except for a few in West Africa.” The couple currently travels mostly to Africa and the Orient, while splitting their time in the United States between their homes in Englewood and Naples, Fla., as well as in Dillon.

Her first experience with mountain gorillas came after a 1984 trip to southern Africa, when a safari operator in Kenya told Keesling she could see the animals in their native habitat.

Keesling says she still remembers that first gorilla encounter. With a group of about six people she hiked up to view and photograph the mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

One silverback gorilla, Mrithi, eventually tired of the company. “He came down (from his noon-day nest) and gave me what is called a ‘gorilla demonstration,’ pounding his chest and roaring.

“My knees were shaking so hard, and I said, ‘Oh, this is fabulous, this is just outstanding,’” Keesling says.

In 1985, Dian Fossey, who had lived more than 15 years with mountain gorillas in Africa, accepted an invitation from Keesling to speak at a conference in San Diego. Keesling then spent more than two weeks with Fossey, who asked Keesling for help.

“She said, ‘Ruth, there are only 248 mountain gorillas left in the world. They’re all going to die, and I’m going to die with them,’” Keesling recalls.

Fossey requested that Keesling send veterinarians to Africa to help care for the mountain gorillas. But just two weeks before Keesling’s scheduled visit in January 1986 to see Fossey at her Rwandan camp, Karisoke, Keesling received a phone call from Claude Ramsey, executive director of the Morris Animal Foundation, that Fossey had been found murdered.

Keesling still wanted to go forward with the scheduled visit, and the Rwandan government eventually allowed her to climb with a group to Karisoke.

What greeted them, Keesling says, she can never forget.

“The gorillas all came out of the jungle, put their arms around us, hugged us and kissed us on our cheeks. Oh, we will never forget that as long as we live,” Keesling says.

Keesling promised to continue Fossey’s work, serving as president of the Digit Fund – the successor to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund – from 1987 to 1991 and “president international” of the fund from 1991-1993. She still serves on the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund-Europe.

In 1986, Keesling founded the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Center in central Africa and funded it through the Morris Animal Foundation.

“Without (Keesling), the program probably would not be here today,” says Kristin Benjamin, Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project liaison.

The Rwandan government in 2000 appointed Keesling to head a task force focusing on the problems involving the gorillas and their habitat. To implement many of the task force’s projects, Keesling established a nonprofit organization last year, the Mountain Gorilla Conservation Fund.

Keesling also helped to open the Wildlife Medicine Department at Makerere Veterinary School in Uganda to train veterinarians in wildlife medicine.

Human diseases are the No. 1 threat to the survival of the mountain gorilla, she says, because the diseases are easily transmitted. Gorillas also get caught in snares poachers set illegally to trap other animals.

CU journalism major Ruth Morris sits next to a pair of crutches in 1952. She was injured skiing with friends on a fast run at Aspen.

Another big threat includes the decreasing amount of wild land near the gorillas’ natural habitat. The continued increase in the African population means that more farms are being established in gorilla territory.

Despite the current threats, the mountain gorilla population has grown from 248 in 1986 to about 655 today. Of the 655 mountain gorillas, 300 were added to the population in the early 1990s after a Keesling-funded DNA study determined that gorillas living in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park were mountain gorillas.

The other mountain gorilla population lives in the Virunga mountain range, a chain of eight volcanoes along the border of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Its numbers have increased from 248 to about 355, Benjamin says.

No mountain gorillas currently live in captivity, Benjamin says.

“I would say, bottom line, the population of mountain gorillas is holding steady, if not slightly increasing,” Benjamin says. “But when you’re talking only about 650 in the world, every single birth is extremely valuable to the survival of the species.”
Ruthkee@aol.com