Out of Africa : Jane Goodall Leaves Her Beloved Chimps to Argue for Animal Rights

It’s about 9,000 miles from the edge of Lake Tanganyika, where Jane Goodall set up camp 30 years ago to take an up-close-and-personal look at a community of chimpanzees. But the renowned scientist steps along as if she were hiking through the East African bush, those alert gray eyes dancing from one detail to another.

Goodall is touring the Cal Poly Pomona swine unit, fondling a minutes-old piglet with a piece of umbilical cord still attached to it, traipsing across a pasture where a couple of sows have set up housekeeping with their litters, dropping anecdotes and observations as she goes.

Actually, says the London-born Goodall, her interest in animals really started with pigs, not chimpanzees.

“When I was 6, we went on holiday to the country,” she says, “and there were eight pigs in a big field. Every time I went toward them they ran off.”

Patiently, the youngster won over one of the English pigs. “Every day, I took bits of food and laid them on the ground,” says Goodall. “I got closer every day until, after six or seven days, I was able to scratch him behind the ear.”

Not so different from the gentle persistence with which the 26-year-old Goodall won acceptance from the chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream area in western Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

A thin woman with silvery hair pulled back from her face, Goodall, who just turned 56, is at the start of a barnstorming tour of the United States and Canada, beating the bushes for better treatment of chimpanzees in laboratories and zoos.

Battling a stubborn case of bronchitis (“I caught it somewhere between Strasbourg and Madrid”), Goodall huddles with some Los Angeles intellectuals and animal rights activists, goes “pigging” in Pomona and churns up waves of enthusiasm about animal rights among the students.

“Everybody was on the edge of their seats,” one woman says after Goodall led a student forum Thursday afternoon.

The chimps seem to have energized Goodall, sending her out as their emissary, transforming her from observer to missionary. “I haven’t spent three weeks consecutively in one place in the past three years,” says the ethologist, or student of animal behavior, who is fast becoming one of the world’s most respected voices for animal rights.

Freedom-loving chimpanzees are being imprisoned in five-foot steel cages and injected with the AIDS virus and hepatitis, she says. They’re being smuggled into European countries, where zoos and photographers chain them up for display. Their natural habitats are being carved up by developers and settlers.

Goodall shows a flinty side when she talks about these things. “It makes me very angry,” she says, displaying a snapshot of a chimp on a two-foot chain leash, the “pet” of a European collector.

Much of the field work in Africa is being done now by assistants, says Goodall, who recently accepted the post of distinguished adjunct professor of anthropology and occupational science at USC. She longs to return to the tranquil Gombe National Park, she says, but she has obligations.

Three generations of chimpanzees have given generously to her, she explains. “If you have any decency in you, you have to give back something of what’s been given,” she says.

Goodall’s story is by now part of the lore of primate studies: young, unschooled English woman, encouraged by the famed paleoanthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey, travels to an African wilderness and, through dogged persistence, is accepted by the chimpanzees as a non-threatening observer. She gets to know Melissa, Fifi, David Graybeard and the rest as unique individuals who show emotions and exhibit personalities.

She writes books, lectures on chimp behavior and stars in a 1965 National Geographic television special, which poignantly introduces the world to a gentle but sharp-eyed watcher, an elegant blonde even in her jungle tans and olive drab, hovering there at the edges of the chimpanzee community.

“I brought my eyes and an unbiased mind,” Goodall says.

Ultimately, her painstaking field studies, which are about to begin a fourth decade, challenged the “hard line that was thought to exist between humans and the rest of the animals,” as she puts it.

She was the first to discover that chimpanzees used tools, shaping twigs into devices they can use to capture termites or using wads of grass to sponge up rain water. She also discovered a darker side to her subjects, an occasional murderous aggressiveness that led one group of male chimps that she was observing to slaughter, one by one, the chimps in another group.

They were, in fact, a lot like humans.

Goodall began her research when animal studies were dominated by the behaviorists, a school of psychologists who rejected the concept of mind and consciousness. “Animals were seen as just little machines, all stimulus and response,” she says.

That led to a disregard for animal feelings. “How many times have you heard somebody say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just an animal,’ ” says Goodall.

But her own observations of human-like behavior in chimpanzees made a lot of scientists take a deeper look. “Now they’re realizing that there’s a continuity between man and the animals,” she says. “It’s not just in terms of the evolution of physical structures but minds as well.”

The conclusion--logically--is that you don’t mistreat animals, she says. “You accept that, in a way, each one is perfect, the end point of thousands of years of evolution.”

Someone brings Goodall a container of coffee. She peers at it closely. “A tiny green fly,” she says, allowing a microscopic insect to move from the lip of the container to her thumbnail. Then she carefully transports it to a sculpture of a chimpanzee’s head that she has set on the table in front of her. The bug wanders onto the chimp’s ear.

Her discoveries also gave Goodall, by 1986 a Ph.D recipient from Cambridge and author of the scientific treatise “The Chimpanzees of Gombe,” more respect in the scientific community. “A lot of my colleagues regarded me as a (National) Geographic cover girl,” she says.

She has been accused of sentimentalizing her chimps, making them appear more human than they are. Goodall shrugs off the criticism. The “Disney” view of animal nature is inappropriate, she says, “but I prefer that over the other way, which leads to such cruelty.”

Goodall’s mission has carried her recently to Washington, where she lunched with Secretary of State James A. Baker III and lobbied conservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). “Mr. Baker said, ‘I suppose you don’t approve of my shooting birds,’ “‘ she recalls. “I said: ‘Do you eat the birds? I’d rather see you eating birds that you’ve shot than chickens from some intensive chicken farm.’ ”

She has talked to Michael Jackson about his pet chimpanzees. “I don’t approve of pet chimps,” she says. “They learn to be humans not chimps. But if somebody (like Jackson) can afford to build a really nice habitat, with three or four chimps, then it’s no different from a zoo, really.”

Goodall contends that animals have reached across “the species gap” in acts of friendship.

She tells of a young man, working in a safari park in Florida. His job was to feed some chimpanzees who had been so abused by humans that they were isolated on an island, Goodall recounts. “He was told: ‘Don’t go anywhere near them. They’re victims. They’ll kill you,’ ” she says.

But the young man gradually befriended a male chimp named Old Man, who had been rescued from a research laboratory as a 12-year-old. “He got closer and closer to Old Man, until one day Old Man took a banana from his hand,” she says. “Eventually, he was able to groom the chimp,” or get close enough to stroke its fur, though female chimps on the island still kept their distance.

“Then one day, (the worker) slipped and fell, frightening a baby chimp,” Goodall says. “The baby screamed, and the mother leaped to defend the baby, biting the young man on the neck. The other females attacked also.”

But Old Man went to the young man’s defense. “He pulled the females off and stayed with him until (the young man) had dragged himself to the boat. I went to see him in the hospital and he said, ‘There’s no question that Old Man saved my life.’ ”

The point is that we should reciprocate, Goodall says. “If a chimpanzee can reach across the species gap to help a friend,” she says, “then certainly, with greater understanding, we can reach out to help the chimpanzees.”