Jane Goodall celebrated turning 90 this week. Photo / Getty Images
Dr Goodall, who is best known for her work with chimpanzees, recently celebrated her 90th birthday with as many dogs and explained why she isn’t slowing down.
Jane Goodall turned 90 on Wednesday, and the primatologist-turned-activist seems busier than ever. This year, she’ll be on the road for 320 days. She’ll be raising money for her nonprofit organisations — the Jane Goodall Institute and Roots & Shoots — and encouraging people to take environmental action.
But she is still managing to find time for fun. On Saturday, revellers congregated at Carmel Beach, California, for a 90-dog salute. Hosted by the Wildlife Conservation Network, a nonprofit, and its founder, Charles Knowles, the event saw guests’ Great Danes, goldendoodles, Chihuahuas and other dogs bound across the sand in honour of Goodall, who has said that dogs are her favourite animal (although she is best known for her work on chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania).
On-and-off rain briefly lifted just as Goodall arrived, which one attendee, Jeff Horowitz, attributed to a phenomenon called “Jane Magic.”
After the canine salute, Goodall talked with The New York Times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: I first want to get your thoughts on what just occurred on the beach. I will confess that a dog salute is not something I’d heard of before.
A: It’s never been thought of before. You know, it didn’t go as they planned it. What they planned was at the end, the dogs would file past me and we’d have a photo. That was the salute. But the rain came. So actually it was much better the way it was. I don’t think anything like that’s ever been done. Never.
Q: Does that feel special?
A: Oh, it’s amazing. This tour is my 90th birthday year tour around the world, and there are events everywhere. We’ve got 25 Jane Goodall Institutes in different countries, and they all make use of my birthday. They do events, they can make money and do auctions. And because it’s Jane’s 90th, big deal — for them. This was the only event I really, really looked forward to in the whole year. And it was as good as I could have imagined.
Q: How do you think it would have gone if it’d been a 90-chimp salute instead?
A: It would have been a disaster. I wouldn’t have come.
Q: The world knows you best for your research on chimpanzees, but I know you want to talk about dogs, and especially your childhood dog, Rusty. When you left Africa to get your doctorate, what was it about that relationship with a pet that helped you understand primate behaviour?
A: Here I am registered at Cambridge, and very nervous. First thing, I was told that I’ve done everything wrong. Chimps shouldn’t be named, they should be numbered. You can’t talk about their personalities. You can’t talk about them having brains capable of solving problems. And you certainly can’t talk about them having emotions. You cannot be scientifically objective if you have empathy with your subject.
Well, the last I just knew was wrong. But the first three — personality, mind, emotion — my dog Rusty, when I was a child, taught me that was absolute piffle. Balderdash. Rubbish.
Q: What about Rusty showed you that old ways of thinking about animals were wrong?
Probably any dog would have taught me. We all know that they can be happy, sad, fearful and that they’re highly intelligent. Rusty, I’ve never known a dog like him. He didn’t even belong to us. This is the strange thing, like so much of my life. He belonged to a hotel down the road. He used to come along, bark outside our house at 6 in the morning, get let in, stay with us all morning, go home for lunch, come back and leave when we put him out at 10. The hotel knew, they couldn’t have cared less. It was as though he was sent to me.
Q: Sent to you by who?
A: [Goodall points up.] What I was talking to, saying, “Please don’t let it rain on the whole afternoon today.”
Q: How do you feel about being labelled an icon?
A: I was walking through the market in Santa Fe. This couple came up, and the woman said something nobody’s ever said since, thank God. She said, “Are you Jane Goodall?” I said yes. She said, “Can I touch you?” Imagine. I said, “Well, we could shake hands.”
The media have created an icon. The only way I can cope, and it took awhile, was to think there’s two Janes. This one — the one you saw on the beach with the dogs — and the icon. I have a jolly hard job keeping up with the icon, I can tell you. At first, I put dark glasses on and let my hair down; they still recognised me. Then I realised, for what I’m trying to do, I need to use this.
Q: Was your decision to focus on activism and advocacy a way to take control of the image that the news media was constructing and use it to do good in the world?
A: Sort of. Right at the beginning, the media was not very kind. When my first information about Gombe came out, about tool-using, there were scientists saying, “Why should we believe her, she hasn’t been to college, she’s just a girl.”
The thing was: I never wanted to be a scientist. Because when I was growing up, women weren’t scientists. Articles began writing and saying, “Jane Goodall is only recognised because she’s on the cover of National Geographic. And she’s only on the cover of National Geographic because she’s got good legs.”
So, for me, what did I want to do? I wanted to get back to the chimps and go on learning about them. So, if it’s my legs that have got me this position, thank you, legs.
Q: When you ramped up your conservation activism in 1986, were you concerned about an increase in media attention, given this history?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because I knew what I was supposed to do.
One of the few people who has criticised me recently was Elon Musk. He was critical of what I always say about human population growth as one of the things that we have to think about when we want to protect the planet for future generations. I invented “Voluntary Population Optimisation.” Could you criticise that? Voluntary? And optimising? I talked about VPO and I never got heckled, I never got any problem.
Q: There are worries, though, on the other end of the spectrum, about human overpopulation concerns being turned into involuntary population control.
A: You must never use control. Never. Control is wrong. You can’t control people like that. It has to be voluntary.
Around Gombe, we introduced this program, TACARE, to help people find ways of living without destroying the environment. It includes restoring fertility to overused farmland without chemicals, and then we introduced scholarships to give girls a chance at secondary education. And also family planning.
Q: So, family planning for you is connected to lifting people out of poverty.
A: And giving women the power to choose for themselves how many children they have.
Q: I’m curious about your packed, worldwide birthday tour. I don’t think I would have the energy for this, and you’ve been travelling extensively for decades.
A: At your age, I wouldn’t have had the energy. No way. You realise when you get to 90, I don’t know where the end will be, but I’m obviously closer to it than I was when I was 70. Much closer than when I was 60.
But if you feel you have a mission to try and get more people to understand we need to take action, and that your individual action will make a difference, then there’s so much of the world that hasn’t had this message. Instead of slowing down, what can I do but speed up?
Q: One former high school teacher told me she stumbled on the dog salute by accident. But she got the chance to chat with you, and she was ecstatic.
A: It can sound kooky, I know, but things have happened in my life that look like coincidences, but I don’t think were. And I personally think every person comes into this world with a role to play.
When I look back over my life, I mean, my goodness, the coincidences that led me to the path where I am now were quite clearly points where I could have said yes or no. It depends whether you think there’s just this life or something beyond, I happen to think there’s something beyond. I feel I was born with a mission. Right now, that mission is to give people hope. So, when I get exhausted, I look up there and say: “You put me in this position, you bloody well help me get through the evening.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Darren Incorvaia
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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