Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall
Dame Jane Morris Goodall, DBE, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots program, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. She has...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth3 April 1934
CityLondon, England
I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.
If you really want something, and really work hard, and take advantage of opportunities, and never give up, you will find a way.. Follow your Dreams.
My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the 'dark continent', and because I was a girl.
When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.
As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.
Whales, like elephants, are so social and intelligent. This hurts me to think of them being transported, put in noisy airplanes, and brought to a horrible concrete pen when they're supposed to be out in the sea.
As a child, we couldn't afford holidays overseas, so instead I travelled through books. I was inspired by Dr Dolittle and Tarzan.
However much you know giraffes, to see one in the wild for the first time feels prehistoric.
It's not Africa that is destroying the African rainforest, it's selling concessions to timber companies that are not African, they are from the developed world - Japan, America, Germany, Britain.
If we start with chimpanzees, they differ from us with the composition of the DNA by only just over one percent. So, as far as genetics go, we're almost identical. The composition of the blood, the immune system, the structure of the brain - almost identical.
Language allows us to talk about the past and plan the future. We can teach children about things that are not present. And above all, we can bring people with different backgrounds and different knowledge together to discuss our problems. This actually gives me hope. I still think we are smart enough to not destroy planet Earth, our only home.
It's the bond between mother and child, which is really, for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.
I have never had an animal that didn't have a personality, one differing from another.
The more we spread the word, the further it will go and more it will change!