Jane Goodall, a Chum of Chimps

Raising Money and Awareness
Jane Goodall: Chum of Chimps

"What the chimps have taught me over the years is they're so like us. They've blurred the line between humans and animals."
— Jane Goodall

At Gombe National Park, Goodall made two discoveries: chimpanzees eat meat and use long grass as a tool to pluck termites from a mound.

"While I have the energy, I feel this is what I am meant to be doing."
— Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall kisses Tess, a 5- or 6-year-old female chimpanzee at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya (Jean-Marc Bouju/AP Photo)

N A N Y U K I, Kenya, Dec. 15 — Jane Goodall was a schoolgirl in England, barely older than the droopy-eyed chimpanzee now in her arms, when she decided she would live among Africa's animals, write books about them—and find Tarzan.
    At age 11, she fell "madly in love" with the virile, jungle-raised hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories.
    "I was incredibly jealous of Tarzan's Jane and I thought she was a real wimp, and I'd have made a much better mate for Tarzan myself," Goodall said in an interview. "That was when I had this dream of going to Africa."
    Goodall did, of course, go, and she became the world's most renowned and revered primatologist.
    "My mother used to tell me, 'Jane if you really want something, you work hard enough, you take advantage of opportunities, you never give up, you will find a way."'
    That is the message Goodall delivers in her latest projects: advocating animal rights, raising money for chimpanzee sanctuaries and doing other conservation work.
    "What is remarkable now is how all of this is coming together, different bits of my passion, experience are just seeming to be in the right place at the right time now," she said.
    Determined to learn about animals, Goodall worked as a waitress to earn her ship fare to Africa. At age 23, she settled into "a boring old secretarial job" in Nairobi, Kenya, until anthropologist Louis Leakey agreed to send her, untrained, to Tanzania to observe chimpanzees.
    "Louis chose me without any scientific degree because he wanted an open mind," said Goodall, now 64. Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas, and Birute Gladikas, who studied orangutans, soon followed her.

A Fellow Tool User
At Gombe National Park, Goodall made two discoveries—chimpanzees eat meat and use long grass as a tool to pluck termites from a mound. She also described the personalities of her group of chimpanzees, making Flo, Flint, Fifi, Pom and Passion as familiar as family around the world.
    She spoke of bonds, weak and strong, between mothers and infants, sibling rivalry, male dominance and sexual appetites all in human-like terms: Flo was a wonderful mother, though promiscuous. Passion was cold-hearted and, with her daughter, killed and ate all but one of the offspring of other females.
    When Flo died in 1972, The Times of London ran an obituary. She was found face down in a stream by her youngest son, Flint, who died from grief three weeks later.
    "It's become like a soap opera. People are fascinated—what is the next installment in the Fifi story?" Goodall says.
    For fans, she has an update: "They got this skin disease and Freud got sick, and so lost his top position to his younger brother, Frodo. Fifi lost her last baby."
    Goodall is grateful she had no background in science when she began her work—it allowed her to view animals with greater compassion. But Leakey insisted she earn a doctorate.
    "Louis told me, 'Jane you must have a Ph.D. because if you don't, you'll never be able to get your own money and stand on your own feet, nor will you be able to make use of your facts,"' she said.

'Dr. Jane'
Goodall earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1965, the same year National Geographic published "Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimps."
    Now famous and equipped with a degree, "Dr. Jane," as she is popularly known, returned to Gombe, and what has become the world's longest study of wild animals—nearly 38 years.
    Goodall said her idyllic life researching "incredible beings" in the forest was disrupted when she saw a horrific film of experiments on laboratory animals at a conference in Chicago in 1986.
    "I knew I had to do something," she said. "It was payback time."
    Goodall has taken advantage of her reputation to enlist the help of people great and small—from President Nelson Mandela of South Africa to schoolchildren in Billings, Mont.
    "Doors open. They think of me as a legend. And they'll give me an appointment because they want to see if I'm real, and what I'm like," she said.
    Goodall has passed through those doors to speak out against the abuse of animals, to open sanctuaries for illegally captured great apes and to encourage people everywhere to make the world a better place.

Some Medical Research OK
Responding to criticism of her condemnation of lab experiments on animals, Goodall says she supports use of animals for necessary research, and notes her own mother's life was saved by a pig's heart valve.
    She has been criticized, too, for putting money into sanctuaries for captured primates, rather than protecting dwindling forests where the 250,000 remaining chimps live—mostly in the neighboring Congos, Gabon and Cameroon. At the turn of the century, there were about 2 million.
    "What the chimps have taught me over the years is they're so like us. They've blurred the line between humans and animals," Goodall said.
    "Just as we can't turn our back on an orphan human child, we can't turn our back either on these guys," she said, cuddling sad-eyed Tess, a 6-year-old chimp.
    Goodall calls airplanes her home because she spends so much time traveling from lecture to lecture. She enlivens many of her speeches with a loud crescendo—the chimpanzee pant-hoot call—that delights Goodall groupies.
    During a lecture trip to Kenya, Goodall spoke about how logging has destroyed the habitats of chimpanzees and gorillas and how roads winding deep into African forests have left them vulnerable to poachers.

War Orphans
She also visited Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, 212 acres of grassland and forest on a river 110 miles north of Nairobi.
    There, beneath cloud-cloaked Mount Kenya, 26 chimps who survived capture in Congo and war that surrounded their sanctuary in Burundi have found safe haven. Goodall also has sanctuaries in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and South Africa.
    For Goodall, it was a reunion with old friends.
    Accustomed to the curious fingers of chimps, she stripped off necklace and watch, and wore her silvery hair swept back in a ponytail.
    Goodall issued a breathy "hah, hah, hah" from low in her throat, mimicking chimpanzees' greeting. Chimps competed for time in her arms. Bahati jumped on her back; Sophie wrestled her to the mud.
    She delighted in seeing the newborn son of Judy, who was disabled by polio. Poco, who walks strangely upright because he grew up in a tall, narrow cage, showed off with an impressive display of stick swinging.
    Goodall said she misses the time she used to have with chimps, and for research and writing. But, she added, "while I have the energy, I feel this is what I am meant to be doing."

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