Dog walking with the FT: Jane Goodall
By Stephen Pincock
Published: June 24 2011 22:29 | Last updated: June 24 2011 22:29
It’s a crisp winter’s afternoon in Sydney. The sky is blue, and a frosty wind is blowing down Middle Harbour and across the grassy expanse of The Spit Reserve, a dog-friendly park. Wrapped up in a long cream coat, Dame Jane Goodall emerges into the squall from a black 4x4. “Oh, it’s cold here!” she gasps.
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The briskness is put aside, however, when I introduce her to Sam, my family’s small, shaggy, excitable dog – and our companion for the afternoon. “Hello, Sam,” she calls, and suggests I let him off the leash. Sam promptly sprints for the beach, where other dogs are running and swimming. “That’s better,” she says, and follows him down to the sand.
For more than 50 years, Goodall has been famous as the woman who taught the world about chimpanzees. As a young woman with little more than secretarial training, she was chosen by the anthropologist Louis Leakey to live among a group of chimpanzees and study their behaviour.
Soon after arriving in the Gombe national park in Tanzania in 1960, Goodall found a vantage point 500ft above Lake Tanganyika, where she could watch the chimps in the valley below – particularly one she named David Greybeard. Within five months she saw him doing something of tremendous significance – using a stem of grass as a tool to extract termites from a nest. It was an enormous discovery. Until that point, tool use was considered the defining characteristic of humanity, the thing that set us apart from the animals.
Although Goodall continues to be closely involved with chimpanzee research, since the 1980s her focus has been on the wider issues of conservation, particularly through a youth programme called Roots & Shoots. This is now active in 127 countries and encourages young people to take on projects to help other animals and the environment. Goodall’s philosophy – that each of us can make a difference every day – clearly chimes with the growing numbers of people taking part.
Delivering that message has turned her into a kind of Ancient Mariner of the environmental movement. She is never in the same place for more than three weeks. For years now, she’s been on the road more than 300 days a year, working 15-hour days, seven days a week.
Now 77, Goodall is slight, but not frail. Her white hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and her unlined face exudes calm. There’s also a mischievous twitch at the corner of her mouth, and a twinkle in her eye. As she and Sam wrestle with sticks, she tells me how important dogs were as an inspiration for her early work.
An intelligent – “quite opinionated” – mutt called Rusty was her childhood companion, teaching her that animals other than humans do have emotions. When she emerged from the jungle, she reported that chimps, too, were emotional beings. The then scientific establishment dismissed the idea out of hand. “University professors told me that animals do not have emotions. But Rusty and other animals had taught me that was wrong.” Things have come a long way, she notes. “These days you can study the animal mind at universities, and even animal personality and emotions.”
Although she travels too much to have one of her own, dogs remain an important part of Goodall’s life. “People think that my favourite animals are chimps, but I don’t really think of them as animals any more than I think of humans as animals – although we are of course. In fact, dogs are my favourite, because of the deep relationship they have with us. There’s something about having a dog in a room full of people that just illustrates that so well. It opens the heart. And if it doesn’t, they’re not the sort of people I want to know.”
Her constant travelling means that Goodall is fortunate enough to meet a range of people she does want to know, from inner-city kids to heads of state. At a conference a couple of days earlier, she had talked about how important dogs are for contentment. Later, she shared a dinner table with the Dalai Lama. At one point, she overheard the spiritual leader telling a young woman to look after her father, who was reaching the age where he might fall and break a hip. The Dalai Lama then turned to Goodall and gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder, saying, “That’s you, too.” Goodall playfully tapped him back, “And you!”
We clamber up from the beach and walk towards the house she’s staying at. Sam trots between us, Goodall keeping an eye on him with gentle but firm commands. “I get so upset by the way people think that in order to train a dog you’ve got to have dominance and that you’ve got to have instant obedience,” she says.
When I first thought of suggesting to Goodall that we take the dog for a walk, I had been worried she would be opposed to the whole idea of having pets, or keeping animals in zoos, but her views are more nuanced than that. “We have this glorified idea of freedom,” she says. “For chimps, living somewhere like Gombe is certainly the ideal – but if you’re a chimp in the wild elsewhere in Africa, there’s always a tension from destruction of their habitats, poachers and so on. Or there’s a risk of being captured for medical research or circuses or pets. So next to Gombe, a good modern zoo with a good amount of space, safety and people around who care for them and look after them, is also good.
“Most people don’t bother to put themselves in the position of a chimp,” she says. “They assume they know best.”
Once we’re at the house, Goodall and I continue talking while Sam dashes around the garden. But after a few minutes, someone brings him back on the leash, explaining that he had nearly eaten one of the neighbour’s pair of free-roaming rabbits. I start to give him a stern talking-to, but Goodall quickly comes to Sam’s defence. “He’s not naughty, he’s just being a dog.”
Dogs and humans have forged a shared bond of understanding since man and wolf first joined forces, but Goodall has noted that chimps also seem to get along well with canines. “It’s fascinating,” she says. “I’d love to study it. I’ve seen many examples of dogs and chimps that form close bonds. I even wrote a children’s book about one.” That book, Rickie and Henri, tells the true story of a chimp sold as a pet in Congo. He bonds with a dog, who carries him on his back.
As we make our farewells – Goodall has another appointment to get to – she gives Sam a final pat. “He’ll sleep well tonight,” she says. “And he’ll be dreaming of rabbits.”
For information on the Jane Goodall Institute, visit www.janegoodall.org.uk
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011
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