Motivation

Jane Goodall is well-known for her interest in chimpanzees, having spent decades living with them and studying their behavior. She tells the story of how she started in her interest in wildlife and the life of chimps. As a young child, she used to bring in her bed earthworms and earth with bugs of all kinds. Instead of scolding her, her patient mother gently told her to take the earthworms and bugs back to their natural habitat where they can continue living. As a four-year-old she once spent four hours in a henhouse, waiting silently to see where the egg comes out. Her family searched all over for her and even called the police. She finally came out of the henhouse beaming with joy and excitement, and they all had to sit down and listen to Jane explain excitedly the wonder of that moment when the egg fell to the ground from the chicken’s behind. Jane Goodall would spend 60 years of her life living at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, for her studies about the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees.  She claims that in 1900 there were an estimated 1 million chimpanzees living in the world. Today there are about 340,000. As a child, as an alternative to a teddy bear, Goodall's father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee. Goodall has said her fondness for this figure started her early love of animals, commenting, "My mother's friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares." On the contrary, it opened up for her a fascinating world of study and intense observation as a primatologist and anthropologist. Today, Jubilee still sits on Goodall's dresser in London.