Lecture by legendary chimp expert Goodall draws thousands.
Jane Goodall discusses lifelong love of animals in visit to Southwestern University campus.
Contact Claire Osborn at 2460040. GEORGETOWN — Not many people can carry around a stuffed animal at age 79, hoot like a chimpanzee and command an audience of 3,000. Jane Goodall did it this week at Southwestern University in Georgetown where she gave a lecture as part of her “Sowing the Seeds of Hope Tour.”
The world-famous expert on chimpanzee behavior began her speech with her imitation of the greeting call of a chimp. People laughed. “This is the sound you would hear if you came to Gombe National Park,” she said. The park, in Tanzania, is where Goodall made her breakthrough discovery in the 1960s that chimpanzees fashioned tools to catch termites to eat.
“Back then people thought only humans made tools,” she said at her speech Tuesday night at the university.
Goodall said she grew up in a poor family in London where her mother discovered her in bed at age 11/2 clutching a handful of earthworms, she said. “I always really loved animals from the dog in the house to the cat to the insects in the garden,” she said. At age 10 she read the book “Tarzan of the Apes” and “that’s when my dream began that I would grow up and go to Africa and live with animals and write about them,” she said.
She went to Africa in her 20s and began working with Louis Leakey, a British anthropologist who gave her an opportunity to study the chimpanzees.
Goodall established the nonprofit Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 which promotes conservation, education and sustainable living.
She said Tuesday that the institute worked with villagers who lived near the Gombe Stream National Park to create a buffer around the park for the chimps.
“I got an email three days ago that a young female (chimp) had appeared in the park that no one recognized,” she said. “This is hope for the future,” she said.
The chimp was evidently the first to use the wilderness corridor to get into the park, she said.
Goodall, who travels 300 days a year to promote conservation goals, has also established a youth group called “Roots and Shoots.”
Her lecture ended on a serious note after Jean Pierre Murenzi, one of three students chosen by faculty to ask her questions, inquired about how the death of one of her colleagues, Dian Fossey, had affected her.
Fossey studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda where she was found hacked to death in her mountain camp in 1985. The murder has not been solved.
Goodall said calmly that she had many arguments with Fossey because Fossey would beat poachers instead of trying to give them a job so they wouldn’t hunt the gorillas. “She did save them (the gorillas) but she didn’t save herself,” Goodall said.