I was the sort of person who didn’t care about hairdressing and clothes and parties and boyfriends. I really wanted to be in the wild.
I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.
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.
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.
We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.
You’re thinking about putting scientists into small cages and doing research on them. I wish it could happen sometimes.
I didn’t want to become a professor or get tenure or teach or anything. All I wanted to do was get a degree because Louis Leakey said I needed one, which was right, and once I succeeded I could get back to the field.
I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.
It was both fascinating and appalling to learn that chimpanzees were capable of hostile and territorial behavior that was not unlike certain forms of primitive human warfare.
We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was “just human”.
War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.
But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.
It’s up to us to save the world for tomorrow: it’s up to you and me.
I urge you to read Eternal Treblinka and think deeply about its important message.
I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other’s company.
Just remember – if you are really and truly determined to work with animals, somehow, either now or later, you will find a way to do it. But you have to want it desperately, work hard, take advantage of an opportunity – and never give up.
If we could just stop building up armies and things like that, we would have all the money we need for wildlife and poverty.
I cannot remember a time when I did not want to go to Africa to study animals.
There isn’t a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.
If we do not do something to help these creatures, we make a mockery of the whole concept of justice.