Jane Goodall Podcast
ABC Radio National in Australia has an excellent podcast on a talk by Jane Goodall , an English primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist, who is well known for conducting a forty-five year study of chimpanzee social and family life. In her talk, Goodall addresses the issue of animal personality and animal minds. It is a powerful […]
ABC Radio National in Australia has an excellent podcast on a talk by Jane Goodall , an English primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist, who is well known for conducting a forty-five year study of chimpanzee social and family life.
In her talk, Goodall addresses the issue of animal personality and animal minds. It is a powerful reminder of how much this issue has been a scientific taboo for not too long ago.
The podcast info can be found here and the transcript is available through ABC Radio National’s page.
Here is a part of the transcript from Goodall’s talk:
I’ll end with a last story…it’s about a chimpanzee whose mother was shot…again, when he was about one-and-a-half in Africa, and he was shipped to a zoo in North America. And for about 10, 15 years he lived quite by himself in a small cage with iron bars and a cement floor. This highly social being, alone, bored stiff. And then a new zoo director decided that he would build the biggest enclosure in North America. He surrounded it with a moat filled with water because chimps don’t swim. He got 19 other chimpanzees…he wanted a nice, big gene pool.
First, it took a long time before they were all introduced to each other because there’s always this competition for dominance among the males, but eventually it’s all done and they’re all let into the enclosure, and it’s fine…until one of the young males challenges the senior male. The senior male is he who has previously lived alone in his little cage, Jo-Jo his name is. And as this young male comes charging towards him with the typical dominance display of the adult male-hair bristling, throwing stones and so forth-Jo-Jo is terrified. He never had a chance to learn about these things because he left his mother so young. And in his fear he goes into the water. He doesn’t know anything about water either; it’s something you drink in a cup. And he’s so frightened he gets over the railing that has been built to stop the chimps drowning in the deep water beyond.
Remember also to visit the Jane Goodall Institute.
