By HArold gwin
By HArold gwin
YOUNGSTOWN
Jane Goodall didn’t anticipate that studying family groups of chimpanzees would become her life’s work when she went to Africa from her home in England in 1957.
In fact, she wasn’t even going there to study chimpanzees, she said.
“I was passionate about animals as a child,” she told The Vindicator in an interview. She will visit Youngstown for a speech to a sold-out house at Stambaugh Auditorium on Tuesday night.
She jumped at the chance, as a young woman of 23 to visit Africa and meet Louis Leakey, a renowned anthropologist and paleontologist, and was willing to study any animals, she said.
It was Leakey who asked her to study chimpanzees, a project he thought would take about 10 years. She thought it would take three years, but she spent 40 years in the field and continues that work today, having done ground-breaking research and gaining world fame along the way as a primatologist, anthropologist and ethologist.
She also found time to create the Jane Goodall Institute, which now has 25 separate locations around the world focusing on conservation and research. That list includes Chimpanzee Eden in South Africa that’s the subject of a television show, “Escape to Chimp Eden,” on the Animal Planet network.
The show has been helpful in saving chimpanzees, she said.
At 76, she doesn’t get back to Africa often, spending 300 days every year on the road, speaking to groups and organizations to raise money to continue the institute’s work and educating people about the importance of conservation.
She tries to visit the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania (which she founded) twice a year and tries to visit other institute locations at least every other year.
Fund-raising is a daunting task, she said.
Goodall said she speaks to full-house audiences wherever she goes, and people are very receptive to her message, but that doesn’t always translate into financial support or a change in behavior.
Chimpanzees are amazingly fascinating creatures , and people are eager to learn about them, but keeping them as pets is a “terribly, terribly bad idea,” Goodall said.
They’re taken from their mothers as infants and have no chance at a normal chimpanzee life, she said. They’re cute to dress up as babies, but, as they get older, they don’t want to be treated like human children and are, “very, very unpredictable,” she said, making reference to a tragic chimpanzee attack on a woman in Connecticut last year, in which the woman’s face was torn off.
She has lobbied to end the practice of keeping chimpanzees as pets, she said.
Goodall acknowledges she sometimes gets depressed about about environmental problems, such as the growing loss of animal habitat land.
But that’s counteracted by all of the incredible people she meets, she said.
Every single day, every one of us makes a difference in the world, she said, adding, we have a choice to make as to what type of difference we will make.
Goodall will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Stambaugh Auditorium to a full house. No more tickets are available.