Primatologist Jane Goodall has little empathy for chimps
FOR all her stature and striking self-possession, primatologist Jane Goodall, 82, is softspoken and undemonstrative to the point of seeming slight and retiring.
This, though, is the deceptive exterior of an essential gentleness that is the wellspring of her indefatigable activism. Empathy – controversially in some scholarly circles – was the unorthodox mainstay of her ground-breaking scientific research into the behaviour of chimpanzees and it remains the watchword of her punishing 300-days-a-year travelling schedule to convince people not only to see the world differently, but to be in the world differently.
On this, she believes, the quality of life on the planet depends.
In July 1960, at the age of 26, Goodall travelled from England to what is now Tanzania and ventured into the little-known world of wild chimpanzees.
So begins the brief biography of probably the world’s most famous primatologist on the website of her own Jane Goodall Institute, an organisation that today spans nearly three dozen countries.
This network, coupled with her Roots and Shoots organisation (operating in 100 countries) for young people, is founded on the reputation she built almost single-handed in the forests of Tanzania.
With the scantest resources – little more than a notebook and binoculars, and a modestly equipped camp – and no formal training beyond a long-nurtured fascination with nature, and with Africa, Goodall delivered pioneering insights.
She was fortunate on a visit to Kenya – at the invitation of a childhood friend – to meet the acclaimed anthropologist Louis Leakey. Leakey believed studying the behaviour of “higher primates” such as chimpanzees could yield important information on evolution and felt that Goodall was the right person for the job.
He was right – though the task was tougher than at first it seemed.
Few studies of chimpanzees had succeeded because of the difficulty of getting near enough to them, and watching them for long enough. And, to start with, Goodall found she could never get any nearer than 500m before her intended subjects fled.
But, having established a camp on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in the Gombe Stream Reserve, she was in for the long haul, gradually making herself familiar to the animals, and winning their trust.
It is recorded that “the chimpanzees soon tolerated her presence and, within a year, allowed her to move as close as 9m to their feeding area.
After two years of seeing her every day, they showed no fear and often came to her in search of bananas.”
Her growing intimacy with the animals – instead of numbering them, she gave them names, such as David Greybeard, Fifi, Goliath, Freud and Frodo – attracted criticism from the science community, for appearing to lack dispassion and rigour.
Yet, as Wikipedia notes: “Goodall observed things that strict scientific doctrines may have overlooked” and she “observed what no other primatologists before her had seen or appreciated”.
Among these insights were that the animals had unique and individual personalities, and emotions expressed in complex community and family bonds.
“These findings suggest that similarities between humans and chimpanzees exist in more than genes alone, but can be seen in emotion, intelligence, and family and social relationships.”
She also witnessed aggression, violence and aberrant behaviour.
In particular, her Gombe Stream research challenged two long-standing beliefs: that only humans could make and use tools (she saw chimpanzees using, sometimes reshaping, stalks of grass to extract termites from the ground), and that chimpanzees were vegetarian. She witnessed hunting, and the sharing of meat.
Her work is acknowledged to have helped “redefine the relationship between humans and animals in ways that continue to resonate around the world”, as her institute puts it.
If she began her work without so much as a diploma, it is no surprise it was the subject of a PhD in ethology from Cambridge in 1965, Goodall becoming the eighth person in the university’s long history to be permitted to do a doctorate without an undergraduate degree.
She still has a home in Tanzania, and visits Gombe at least twice a year, but her understanding of the indivisibility of life has impelled her efforts towards deepening human understanding, and improving the lives of people.
Goodall is an unlikely globalist – and not in the usual sense – but she is, today, on a global mission to get more people “to take action on behalf of all living things and the planet we share”.
It was tiring, she confessed, and she would “love to get off the roundabout, and do more writing”.
Travelling has been her life since 1986 – but, “having been blessed with a strong body, and the gift of communication, that’s what I feel I must do. And I wouldn’t do it if it did not have an impact.
“They have been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest… never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. They have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.”
But the animals themselves, and the environment, was threatened by their more intelligent cousins.
In 1900, there were an estimated 1 million chimps in the world. Today there are fewer than 300 000.
“Part of my task is to break down that mythical line between us and them, to show how like us chimpanzees are… and to show how the biggest difference between us, our intellect, is being so misused.
“How bizarre that the most intellectual creature to walk the planet is destroying it!”
The biggest challenge lay in engaging people, being prepared to listen to them, and not simply tell them off.
Goodall is unsentimental about human-chimpanzee empathy, or its absence.
“I have more empathy for my dog than for chimpanzees,” she said.
“Some of them are just horrible.”
She added with a wry, half-damning, half-tolerating smile: “After all, they are too like us.”