Jane Goodall, patron saint of chimpanzees, makes plea for her primates in talk at Wellington Zoo

Jump to Comments

It’s not every day one gets the chance to see a saint-like person in the flesh. The only one I have till now was Nelson Mandela, when he was here for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in 1995. Yesterday my daughter and I attended a lecture given by Jane Goodall at Wellington Zoo. Goodall is a living saint for chimpanzees in the way Mother Theresa was a saint for the poor of Calcutta and she has a Mandela-like aura of humility, compassion and determination.

Goodall’s background is quite well known thanks to the numerous documentaries about her work. Her childhood passion for animals led to the noted anthropologist Louis Leakey hiring her from Britain as an assistant in 1960 and asking her to study the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She made the extraordinary discovery that chimpanzees could make simple tools, after observing one strip the leaves from a small branch to stick into a termite mound to get termites from it to eat. Until then, it was thought only humans could make and use tools. She spent decades living among the Gombe chimpanzees and in the past couple of decades, she has campaigned around the world for greater respect and protection for these animals, which are our closest living relatives, their DNA being more than 98 per cent the same as ours.

As she told the audience at the zoo, so close are we to chimpanzees that they catch the same diseases as we do, and all of us (except Jehovah’s Witnesses, she said to much amusement) could safely have blood transfusions from them.

Slim, 74, and frail-looking (but she probably isn’t) Goodall speaks quietly but firmly and kept the audience engaged for more than 90 minutes. She had several pages of notes on the lectern but appeared rarely to look at them.

Much of her talk was about her work observing chimpanzees in their natural (and fast disappearing) habitat in Tanzania, with a number of amusing and endearing anecdotes about how the animals care for each other in their extended family groups. For example, she observed a female chimp walking along a trail with the chimp’s toddler brother. The sister saw something of concern ahead and leapt up a tree. Her brother kept walking. The sister gave a series of warning cries then leapt from the tree and scooped up her brother just before he ambled upon a poisonous snake.

I’d long known that chimpanzees could be taught human-deaf sign language but had thought they could only use it with humans. Goodall detailed how they could learn up to 400 words in sign language and use it to communicate with each other (and she has clearly learned to “speak” Chimp herself, as she unselfconsciously gave several verbal renditions of the sounds the apes make in different circumstances).

These anecdotes and examples served of course to make chimpanzees appear almost human and to tug at our heartstrings to support her campaign to protect chimpanzees and to stop the continued use in some countries of using them for medical and other experiments.  It’s a campaign that keeps her on the road (and in the air) for some 300 days a year, under the auspices of the Jane Goodall Institute she founded in 1977 and which in 1991 launched her “Roots & Shoots” programme to make positive changes for animals and the environment.

Nobody in this supportive audience of several hundred in the zoo’s newish “wild theatre” needed any convincing. It was actually a pity that Dr Goodall’s lecture (which also included five-minute presentations from four local scientists about their work to promote the conservation of tuatara, kereru, frogs and other creatures) was held in this small venue at the zoo. She could easily have filled the Michael Fowler Centre and would have done had such a venue been chosen and publicity given to what was a low-key event staged by the Royal Society and the zoo.

The only discordant note in the thoughtful, stimulating talk by this wonderful woman was when she approvingly quoted Al Gore’s utterly discredited claim (made in An Inconvenient Truth) that global warming had made the seas rise and people from South Pacific island nations had been forced to leave their homes (in Gore’s propaganda film, he claimed they had had to move to New Zealand). When Goodall mentioned this as one of the many bad things we humans had done to our planet, my daughter bent towards me and said “but that’s not true.”

But many people believe Gore speaks a new gospel rather than propaganda just as bad as uttered by any ruthless corporation or political spin-doctor,  so Dr Goodall can be excused without qualification for not following the minutiae of the climate change debate, so busy and dedicated is she to advancing the cause of chimpanzees and the other wonderful creatures we share this planet with and
whose welfare should be just as important as the welfare of we humans who exercise the power of life and death over every living thing.

• Footnote: In the photo above you will see Dr Goodall with a toy monkey. Yes, a monkey, not a chimpanzee. This is Mr H, which was given to her long ago by a blind friend who thought it was a toy chimp. Goodall takes it everywhere with her, and even brought it to the stage at the zoo, and sat it in her chair while she was at the lectern. And. The Dominion Post on Saturday carried an article about Dr Goodall’s visit.

8 Comments

Filed under Genuine celebrities, Science

Tags: chimpanzees, Jane Goodall