Jane Goodall: Seeds Of Hope

by Henry Nicholls

An Interview with Jane Goodall: Seeds Of Hope

Jane Goodall is a passionate road warrior, traveling nearly 300 days each year on a worldwide speaking tour to raise awareness, inspire change, and encourage each of us to do our part in making the world a better place. Jane’s love for animals started at a young age and in July of 1960, at the age of 26, she followed her dreams and traveled from England to what is now Tanzania, to bravely enter the little-known world of wild chimpanzees.

She was equipped with nothing more than a notebook and a pair of binoculars, but with her unyielding patience and optimism, she won the trust of the Gombe chimpanzees and opened a window into their lives for all to see. Jane’s studies have taught humanity one of the most important lessons – that we humans are not the only beings on this planet with personalities, minds capable of thinking and above all, emotions. Her findings shook the scientific community and made us re-evaluate what it means to be human.

Exclusive Interview by Henry Nicholls

In February 1935, the year of King George V’s silver jubilee, a chimpanzee at London Zoo called Boo-Boo gave birth to a baby daughter. A couple of months later, a little blonde-haired girl was given a soft-toy replica of the zoo’s new arrival to mark her first birthday. This was Jane Goodall’s first recorded encounter with a chimp. Along the way she has received nearly 50 honorary degrees, and became a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002 and Dame Jane in 2004. Though I have only crossed London to meet her, I am struck by the sudden feeling that I have reached the end of some epic, Henry Stanley-like quest… “Dr. Goodall?” Goodall sits down neatly on the sofa with her back to the bright sun. This is a brief pause in her whirlwind travel schedule of more than 300 days a year, but she displays few signs of weariness – worldly or otherwise.

When she first ventured to Africa in 1957, Jane Goodall says, it had never occurred to her to work with chimpanzees. Rather, she had a far less specific and more romantic dream inspired by fictional characters from the books she had read as a child, notably Dr. Dolittle and Tarzan. “I never wanted to be a scientist per se,” she says. “I wanted to be a naturalist.” Jane Goodall tells a story from her childhood that demonstrates how fixated she was to the Africa of her imagination. As a special treat, her mother, Vanne, had taken her to the cinema to see her first Tarzan film. When the curtains drew back to reveal Johnny Weissmuller in the starring role, however, the young Goodall burst into a fit of hysterical tears. In the quiet of the foyer, she composed herself and told her mother firmly: “That is not Tarzan.”

When she describes her earliest experiences of Africa, however, they don’t sound all that different from the jungles of her dreams. Not long after arriving in Kenya, Jane Goodall captured the attention of Louis Leakey, the palaeoanthropologist, and curator of the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. Within hours of meeting, she had so impressed him with her knowledge of natural history that he had offered her a job. Within months, Leakey and his wife, Mary, set out on an expedition to Olduvai Gorge in what is now northern Tanzania, and Jane Goodall went too. The place was teeming with wildlife.

“There were lions and rhinos and giraffes – I mean, everything was there,” she recalls with a flash of excitement. “I often think that’s one of the most magical times of my whole life.” It was while scouring this ancient landscape for evidence of early humans and other hominids that Leakey first mentioned the idea of establishing a complementary study on wild chimpanzees to the west, at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on the edge of Lake Tanganyika. Three years later, in 1960, Goodall entered the reserve to begin her research. For the first few months in Gombe, it was just her, her mother and a single hired assistant. “I wanted to be alone,” she says, “but I wasn’t allowed.” Jane Goodall pauses, revisiting that period in her mind. “I’ll never forget to go along the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika, then look up…” Up there, in the densely forested valleys that funnel streams off steep hills to the water’s edge, were the chimpanzees she had come to study. With the assistance of a game warden who acted as escort, Jane Goodall , and her mother put up their ex-army tent. “If you wanted air to come in, you just rolled up the sides and tied them with tape,” she says. “Well, the air came in, but the spiders, scorpions, and snakes came in as well.”

Although her mother was terrified – “You know I’m afraid of spiders!” – Jane Goodall was apparently fearless, setting off up the slopes to explore her new home. “I sat up there and just couldn’t imagine I was there. It seemed absolutely unreal.” During her first stint in the field, Jane Goodall struggled to get close to the chimps. However, the individual she named David Greybeard proved a particular inspiration, showing her a side to chimpanzees nobody had ever documented before. In late October 1960, she watched David from a distance as he gnawed away at the freshly killed corpse of what was probably a baby bush pig – an observation that ran counter to the then-widespread assumption that chimps were strict vegetarians. A few days later, Jane Goodall witnessed David making and using a tool to feed on ants. I ask her to describe this moment in detail: “There was vegetation in the way, and David had his back to me… so what I saw was the hand picking up the tool. I saw the movements. And I saw it was obvious he was eating…”

Once David had moved off, Jane Goodall went to investigate and discovered long stalks of grass lying around. Picking a stalk up, she pushed it into one of the narrow entrance holes to the ant colony. The disturbance caused ants to emerge. The chimps, presumably, would then lick them off the grass. After subsequent, clearer sightings of this behavior, Goodall went to Leakey with the discovery. “I knew it was very important because I’d been around Leakey long enough,” she says. At that point, most people believed humans were the only species capable of making and using tools. In response to Jane Goodall ’s observations of David and others, Leakey famously declared: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man’, or accept chimpanzees as humans.” Despite Leakey’s excitement over Jane Goodall ’s early findings, not everyone was ready to embrace them. In late 1961, she arrived in Cambridge, where Leakey had used his connections to enroll her for a doctorate – not something Jane Goodall wanted to do. The patronizing treatment Jane Goodall received at the hands of her mainly male colleagues can hardly have endeared her to the academic lifestyle. She was criticized for giving her study animals names and personalities.

“I didn’t give them personalities; I merely described their personalities.” As for Jane Goodall ’s reported discovery that chimps used tools: “Some scientists actually said I must have taught them.” She laughs. “That would have been fabulous if I could have done that.” “My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.” So when her Cambridge colleagues told her she couldn’t talk about chimps having personality, mind, and emotion, she begged to differ – because of Rusty the black mongrel. “Rusty had taught me otherwise. If you spend time with animals, you’re not going to betray them by taking away something which is theirs.”

Rusty, I discover, was one of two dogs with whom Jane Goodall became friendly in her early teens at The Birches. The other, Budleigh, was a beautiful long-haired collie. “Collies are meant to be bright but he wasn’t,” Jane Goodall says, recalling how Budleigh proved incapable of learning to shake hands.

One day, though, as Jane Goodall continued her efforts to train “Buds”, Rusty the mongrel (watching at a distance) raised his paw. “From that moment I realized Rusty was brilliantly intelligent because, even though I wasn’t teaching him, he’d learned by observing my teaching of Buds.”

If her Cambridge colleagues had been patronizing, it was nothing compared to the treatment she received at a symposium on primates held at the Zoological Society of London in April 1962. After three days of talks, the meeting came to a close with a speech by Sir Solly Zuckerman, an anatomist who had studied monkeys in Africa, and gone on to become secretary of the Society and chief science adviser to the Ministry of Defense.

This was not Jane Goodall ’s first run-in with Zuckerman. At the end of 1961, there had been a press conference at London Zoo to announce her preliminary findings – and she had hatched a plan to use this public platform to call for an improvement in the conditions of the captive chimps at the zoo. “There was a bare cage with a cement floor,” she explains. During the summer months, the chimps had no shade: “It got boiling hot and there was only one platform, the other had broken, so the male got that, and the female had to sit on the floor. It was horrible.”