Remembering Jane Goodall (1993 interview) | Fresh Air

What this episode is about

Jane Goodall reflects on her groundbreaking research of wild chimpanzees, initiated in 1960 in Tanzania, where she challenged scientific norms by attributing human-like qualities to the animals. Now recognized as a leading expert, Goodall discusses her commitment to advocating for chimpanzee welfare and the evolution of scientific perspectives on animal behavior.

Key takeaways

• Jane Goodall proves that naming isn't just a list of numbers; it's a connection that opens the heart.
• Chimpanzees and humans share over 98% of DNA—of course they know how to throw a tantrum.
• Frodo the chimp demonstrates: absolutely no fear means absolutely no respect—watch your back, Jane!
• Goodall's personal touch in research paved the way for science to embrace the emotions of our primate cousins.
• Who knew a soothing sound could lead to a chimpanzee hug? Nature's way of breaking barriers, one call at a time.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Terry Gross (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Jane Goodall (Guest) · 15 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Dale Peterson, Gambi National Park
2. 10:00 – 15:00: David Greybeard
3. 20:00 – 21:46: The Jane Goodall Institute, Visions of Caliban

Notable quotes from "Remembering Jane Goodall (1993 interview) | Fresh Air"

• With chimps. In 1960, Jane Goodall began the first long-term study of wild chimpanzees at Gambi National Park in Tanzania. No one expected her project to still be going 33…

  about Gambi National Park · at 0:08

• Say? How what did he do to help introduce you to the others? He was fantastic. That was David Greybeard, and I probably owe more to him than any other chimp throughout these…

  about David Greybeard · at 10:54

• Goodall, I thank you very much for talking with us. Thank you. Jane Goodall co-authored the new book Visions of Caliban on chimpanzees and people. The Jane Goodall Institute is…

  about Visions of Caliban · at 21:27

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• David Greybeard — Person · 2 mentions · first at 10:58
• Dale Peterson — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:40
  Goodall's latest book, co-authored with Dale Peterson, is about the relationship of humans and chimpanzees. When Goodall first began studying the chimps, she was discouraged from projecting human qualities on the animals, but she.

Books & papers

• Visions of Caliban — Book · 1 mention · first at 21:32

Companies & orgs

• The Jane Goodall Institute — Company · 1 mention · first at 21:34
  Talking with us. Thank you. Jane Goodall co-authored the new book Visions of Caliban on chimpanzees and people. The Jane Goodall Institute is headquartered in Tanzania with an…

Places & events

• Gambi National Park — Place · 1 mention · first at 0:14

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The chimpanzeee is more like humans genetically than any other animal. Perhaps that explains our fascination with chimps. In 1960, Jane Goodall began the first long-term study of wild chimpanzees at Gambi National Park in Tanzania. No one expected her project to still be going 33 years later, but Goodall's research project continues today, and she is now widely acknowledged as the world's leading expert on wild chimpanzees. She spends much of her time now on the road on a crusade to save the wild chimpanzeee and speaking out against the cruel treatment of chimps used in lab experiments.

0:38 Goodall's latest book, co-authored with Dale Peterson, is about the relationship of humans and chimpanzees. When Goodall first began studying the chimps, she was discouraged from projecting human qualities on the animals, but she disregarded the advice. For one thing, I gave them names instead of numbers. Terrible thing to do. For another thing, the first scientific paper I wrote, I talked about chimpanzees as who he and she and I said this individual who and the article came back and it was substituted for he and she and which was substituted for who. And then in those days you couldn't talk about something like adolescence and childhood. You couldn't talk about motivation. You couldn't talk about excitement. There was very very little you could do in terms of describing chimpanzeee behavior in terms that ordinary people would understand.

1:33 Do you think that that that that's changed? Do you think that your more personal style has become in uh accepted scientifically?

1:43 I think that in most scientific circles today these things that I've mentioned are accepted. I think people have come to realize that when we're talking about creatures who share over 98% of their genetic material with us, creatures whom we know to have very very similar central nervous systems and brains. You know, it it's completely crazy to imagine that they wouldn't have similar feelings, similar ways of tackling problems in life. Mostly people accept today that that is so. In writing about chimp behavior, you say that male chimps are more respectful of men, especially men with deep voices, and they take liberties with women. How did you find that out? And what kind of liberties did the chimps take with you?

2:28 Really, until quite recently, there hasn't been that obvious a difference in the way they treat uh or they treated male and female researchers. But we now have one chimpanzeee who's a rogue and he's actually very dangerous to female researchers and most particularly to me. And it's very sad after 32 years in the field that one chimpanzeee has in a way made Gmbi feel a little unsafe to me today. What does he do that's a threat to you?

2:59 He's probably 10 times stronger than I am. I mean a a big male chimp is said to be four to five times stronger than an adult human male. And Frodo is the largest, heaviest chimp we've ever known at GMBBI. He's 115 lbs. He's about 20 years old. He's absolutely magnificent. He's one of Fifi's offspring. And what he'll do is display that charging with his hair bristling, dragging branches and things straight towards me, pull me over, stamp on me, perhaps display away, come back and do the same thing again. He's actually done it three times.

3:37 He's not trying to kill me, but given the nature of the terrain, the steep, rugged slopes that drop down to riverbeds with rocks far below, you know, he's only got to tip me or someone else over the edge, and we've had it.

3:51 I'm sure you've asked yourself why you've become a target of his. Do you have any idea why?

3:56 I can only think that it's because of all the people working at GMI, he has the least fear of me. I've always been able to get very close to even nervous individuals and that's because I'm calm and quiet and I don't try to get too close and I don't push. And so he has absolutely no fear, no respect, no, you know, nothing that will block his aggressive behavior towards human humans, particularly me.

4:26 I'm sure you've asked yourself what the chimps think of you and what they think of what you're doing there and who you are. I doubt they think very much now. I think we're just part of the environment. As you know, there are baboons and there are bush pigs. They used to be buffalo. They've gone now sadly, but there are all kinds of other animals and birds and we're just part of that natural environment to almost all of them. They grew up with us.

4:52 Did you learn to uh make the sounds that chimps used to communicate? I can make most of them. Most of the people studying chimps can make those sounds, but we don't actually make them in the wild. We we I sometimes make them to chimps in captive groups and they usually reply. Certainly that the little greeting sound when you want to approach a nervous young chimp, which I have to do all the time because one of the things that we're doing with the institute is to rescue orphan chimps who whose mothers have been shot by hunters. They're confiscated by the government and we care for them. And to see some of those pathetic little orphans in the markets being sold at the street side. They're dehydrated. Their eyes are dull. They're losing hope. They're losing health. And you go up and you make this soft little which is a gentle greeting. And they'll sometimes put their arm around your neck.

5:52 How come you wouldn't use that language in the wild? Because we've always tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, to keep in the background, to let the chimpanzees get on with their lives, not to try and communicate with them, but to be part of the environment that they will ignore. And you know, apart from the occasional problem, such as with Frodo, that's the way it works. They accept us. They trust us. We can follow them and they can get on with their lives. What else would you say to a chimp in cap in captivity?

6:23 Well, I sometimes make the distance call which chimpanzees at GMI make when they're calling out from one side of a valley to the other and they're basically identifying themselves or perhaps questioning who's over there. I'm here. Is that a sound you could demonstrate for us? Well, I can demonstrate if I just lean away from the microphone because it's rather loud, but

6:53 How did you learn to do that? I mean, did you did you uh practice in the wild? Away from away from the chimps. Well, I practice away from the chimps.

7:03 So, I imagine a lot of the researchers like practice this on each other, huh? Yeah. Well, sometimes if I'm giving a lecture and some of my students in the audience, I explain beforehand, you know, that I'm going to make this call and they're going to reply and that always brings the house down. In in all your years in the field studying chimpanzees, were there particular aspects of chimp behavior that you felt you understood and were particularly like your own, particularly like the way humans behave? Oh, I think a lot. Um, one of the most striking really is the nonverbal communication patterns. So that chimpanzees will kiss, embrace, hold hands, pat one another on the back, swagger, threaten by shaking their fists, tickle.

7:50 And the striking thing here is that not only do the patterns look like so many of ours, but they're used in the same context, so they obviously mean the same kind of thing. When when you first went to the bush, you were given the opportunity to do that by the anthropologist Lewis Leaky. And this was to be the first really long-term study of chimpanzees. Other people, I believe, had studied them for months at a time. You were supposed to go there for a few years. So, you got there and um you you went with your mother because you you weren't allowed to go by yourself. What what was that story? Young English women didn't do that sort of thing. In fact, as I grew up, I was told I couldn't. It's what I'd always wanted to do. But I had this great mother who always used to say, "Jane, if you want to do something enough and you work hard enough and you take advantage of opportunities, you'll get there in the end." And so when I was

8:46 told by the British authorities that it wouldn't be appropriate for me to go out completely on my own without some kind of female companion. My mother was the one who offered to come.

9:00 What did she do to help you when you were getting started? Oh, she was fabulous. She had a clinic. Her brother was a surgeon and he supplied her with all kinds of simple medications like aspirins and band-aids and Epsom salts, you know, that kind of thing, something that anybody can administer.

9:18 And she set up a little clinic on the shore of the lake for the local fishermen who were living around the park. And she had so much patience and so much concern and care that with these simple remedies she sometimes worked wonderful amazing cures. In fact, we found out later that she was known as the white witch doctor and of course this was tremendously helpful in establishing friendly good relationships with the local people and those have remained ever since. How long did she stay with you? She was with me about it was between 3 and 4 months and by that time the local authorities realized that you know it was okay and I was going to be all right and I had a staff by then. I had a cook and a boat driver and I'd made friends with the local people and they said all right you can stay. When you got to Tanzania and you knew you were there to watch and research the chimps, were they easy to find?

10:15 No, they used to run away the first moment they saw me. They would depart into the undergrowth and it was very frustrating. But gradually from an open rocky peak overlooking two valleys, one on the north, one on the south, using my binoculars, wearing the same colored clothes every day, they got used to this queer white-kinned aputoot appeared so surprisingly in their midst. And so gradually I was able to get closer and closer and learn ever more about their fascinating behavior. uh one chimp uh was the particularly helpful to you because he was the first chimp that um befriended you, shall we say? How what did he do to help introduce you to the others? He was fantastic. That was David Greybeard, and I probably owe more to him than any other chimp throughout these long 33 years. For some reason, he had a particularly calm and trusting disposition. And of course, every chimpanzeee has his or her own totally

11:15 individual personality just like we do. And David, instead of running off, would just sit and calmly continue what he was doing. It was David who one day arrived in my camp to feed on the ripe fruits of the oil nut palm growing there. And while he was there, he saw some bananas lying on the table, and he took those. My cook told me about this male chimp who'd arrived and eventually I stayed down and waited to see who it was. And then that's how I found out it was David Graveyard. I'd had already named him from my encounters in the forest. And from that time on, he would sometimes wander up to me in the forest to see if I had a banana somewhere hidden about my person or in my hsack. And the other chimps would start to run and then they'd stop and their eyes were big and wide and they think, "What is this? What is going on?" And so they realized that I wasn't so frightening after all. It was as though David had opened a door

12:15 into what was then a really magic unknown world. What were the signs that you were being accepted by the other chimps?

12:22 They didn't run away. and they stayed when I could approach and they would they would look up and then they'd continue their grooming or their playing or their feeding or whatever it was they were doing before I came. Would they approach you and make friendly gestures toward you?

12:37 Oh, no. Absolutely not. They just continued with what they were doing. Did it ever get to that point as time went on where where chimps would come up to you and and be friendly in a conscious way?

12:48 Well, you see, we tried to discourage all that kind of thing. They would sometimes come up to peer if there was a banana anywhere, but as we discouraged any kind of contact, we didn't really have that much. There was one short period. It was before I realized we could make this a really long-term study. And it was so exciting to be able to go up to and groom a completely wild adult male chimp, David Greybeard. It was so exciting when a mother allowed her infant to come up and touch me. It was so incredibly moving when a juvenile allowed me to play with him. And I wouldn't have foregone those experiences, but in a way they were wrong because it was dangerous to try and establish communication with them. It was dangerous to the objective collection of information.

13:44 You become too much of the story story and start start to change the chimp behavior by your presence and involvement.

13:49 Yeah. Yeah, I mean it would be very easy to become part of the group and then for one that would disturb the natural behavior more than we do by being there anyway and for another could be very dangerous cuz they do uh attack each other quite often for no very obvious reason sometimes and they are very strong and if we were perceived by them to be part of the group they'd probably all treat all of us the way Frodo treats me.

14:14 That's interesting. You know that reminds me I think about 15 years into your research in the mid70s there was a war between two groups of chimps who you were studying and one group was uh annihilated in that war. Did you know that that kind of fighting occurred? No. We knew that the males of one social group which we call a community patrolled the boundaries of their territory. We knew that if they spied a stranger, they might chase and if they caught up with that stranger, attack. We knew that they were sometimes extremely brutal to stranger females, but that there would be a sort of deliberate warfare where one by one the individuals of that small group were hounded down, brutally attacked, and left to die. That was a surprise. A bad surprise.

15:11 How were you able to watch it without getting hurt? Because they weren't attempting to hurt us. They were completely concentrated on the victims. And because we have always made this conscious effort to remain outside their social life. They just ignored us. But it's very frightening to see chimpanzees so aggressive. When you have five or six fully adult males attacking one victim, it's extremely brutal. And it teaches us that just as chimpanzees have very many of the characteristics that we see in ourselves of compassion and love and altruism. So too can they show a dark side of their nature. What's their method of fighting?

15:54 It's stamping, sometimes biting, dragging along the ground. Those are the main components.

16:02 Were you at first gravely disappointed that the chimps had the potential to be as violent as we know people can be?

16:09 Oh, yeah. I mean, I used to think, well, they they're very like people, but nicer. And then I realized that when opportunity arises, they have this nasty, brutal side to them, just like we do. You know, when humans fight a war, you always want to know what is the war about? What is the motivation? Who is wronging who? Uh, when chimps fight a war, what is it about?

16:30 Well, this particular war was the only one we've ever seen, and we're not too sure. I think we shan be very sure until it happens again. But I think it was because one main community divided. It just got rather a lot of males and they divided into two and the smaller section took over what had been the southern part of the range when the community was one. And I think it was simply that the larger number of males wanted to regain access to that part of the territory that they lost after the split. And indeed, after they'd annihilated the smaller fragment of the community, you know, in something rather like a civil war, they did move with their females back into that piece of land that they lost. Jane Goodall is my guest. Let me move to some human violence that uh happened in the 70s in your camp. Four student researchers in your camp were kidnapped by Zirean gorillas. Um how did you find out what had happened? It took

17:33 long agonizing days before one of the students was sent back. She was able to tell what had happened. She brought the demands of the kidnappers with her.

17:44 What were the demands? They wanted money. They wanted various things like publicity. They wanted arms. They did not get the arms. Of course, they got the publicity. I mean, it was all over the international press and they got some money. But the main thing was that the students were returned and they were all safe.

18:05 Was that the only time anyone in your group had been the victim of human violence?

18:10 Yes. And you see, if you imagine how lucky I was because so many of my colleagues who've been studying primates or other kinds of animals in Africa, in Asia, in South America, have had to stop their research, have actually been in physical danger because of political unrest. I mean, it's happened again and again and again. Tanzania, apart from that one incident, it's been peaceful. It's the most It has been the most politically stable government in the whole of Black Africa.

18:44 The site of your research has been a national park in Tanzania. How has the wild changed since 1960 when you started your research? Unbelievably. And I wish on radio one could actually show pictures because I have some pictures showing what it was like along the shore of the lake for maybe 100 miles in 1960. And if you go back there today and you go along the 10 mile strip of GMI shoreline, it's only 10 mi long, this little national park. It looks exactly the same. But if you go to the north or the south, the forested hills which used to come down to the water green and lush with a few little clearings for the fishermen growing their crops. Today there are no trees. It isn't that there's a lot of deforestation. It's that these slopes are completely bare.

19:38 And the frightening thing is you say to yourself, well, what's happened? What does this mean? It means that the chimpanzees and the other forest animals have long since gone apart from a few tiny pathetic remnant groups that are in the the very very steepest valleys. And then you see how the fishermen have been trying to cultivate these inappropriate steep slopes. You see that every time it rains the top soil, this precious thin layer is washed down into the lake. You realize that the fish breeding grounds in the shallows are being silted up and you realize that in 5 6 years if we can't help them in some way, the people will be starving and gone too. And yet there's nowhere for them to go because of increased population and because of refugees coming from Bundi and Zire. I mean it's it's a nightmare situation.

20:31 What's left of the chimp population that you've been studying? The chimp the chimps that we've been studying within the park are completely safe and they're not in danger of poaching. So that as far as wild chimps goes, they live in a kind of paradise. And that I think is because we have employed Tanzanian field staff from the villages around the park, not just in menial capacities as trackers or to help us around camp, but they follow the chimps. They make detailed written reports. They use 8 millimeter video cameras. They're very proud of their work. They care about the chimps. They'll look after them if they're sick. They talk about them to their family and friends in the villages. And so, you see, there's no danger of poaching. Plus, by doing this, we're helping the local economy with with the wages that we pay. Jane Goodall, I thank you very much for talking with us. Thank you. Jane Goodall

21:32 co-authored the new book Visions of Caliban on chimpanzees and people. The Jane Goodall Institute is headquartered in Tanzania with an American branch in Tucson, Arizona. I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Remembering Jane Goodall (1993 interview) | Fresh Air"?

Terry Gross (Host), Jane Goodall (Guest).

What is "Remembering Jane Goodall (1993 interview) | Fresh Air" about?

Jane Goodall reflects on her groundbreaking research of wild chimpanzees, initiated in 1960 in Tanzania, where she challenged scientific norms by attributing human-like qualities to the animals. Now recognized as a leading expert, Goodall discusses her commitment to advocating for chimpanzee welfare and the evolution of scientific perspectives on animal behavior.

What is mentioned in this Fresh Air episode?

5 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including David Greybeard, Gambi National Park, Dale Peterson, Visions of Caliban, The Jane Goodall Institute. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Remembering Jane Goodall (1993 interview) | Fresh Air"?

The episode runs 22 min; the transcript is about 3,671 words in 41 timestamped sections.

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