Through A Window

by Jane Goodall

At the turn of the century chimpanzees were found, in their hundreds of thousands, in twenty-five African nations. From four countries they have disappeared completely. In five others, the population is so small that the species cannot long survive. In seven countries populations are less than five thousand. And even in the four remaining central strongholds chimpanzees are gradually and relentlessly losing ground to the ever-growing needs of ever-growing human populations.

They were five feet from where I sat and once again I was all but overwhelmed by the trust they showed, and poignantly aware of my responsibility towards them: that trust must never be broken. Galahad, dreaming perhaps, suddenly clutched his mother’s hair. Gremlin responded instantly, holding him close, comforting him even as he slept so that he relaxed once more. Watching them I thought, as I so often do now, of the grim fate of hundreds of Africa’s chimpanzees. Of the mothers who are killed, the infants who are seized from their arms and, shocked, terrified and hurt, dragged into a harsh and bitter new life.

airports delays are common and there is seldom anyone to nurture the crated captives. Often, indeed, their departure is illegal so that the dealers involved, and those in their pay, do their best to conceal the existence or at least the nature of the cargo. They are the evil ones, these dealers. With the blood of countless innocents on their hands, they grow fat and rich on suffering, like those who traded human slaves in years gone by.

And what is the lot of these chimpanzees used by scientists because they are so physiologically like humans? How are they treated by those who use their living bodies to try to learn more about human disease, drug addiction and mental illness? Certainly not as honoured guests in the labs.

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a person who, stressed beyond endurance, has given up, succumbed utterly to the crippling helplessness of despair? I once saw a little African boy whose whole family had been killed during the fighting in Burundi. He too looked out at the world unseeing, from dull, blank eyes.

Imagine being shut up in such a cell, with bars all around; bars on every side, bars above, bars below. And with nothing to do. Nothing to while away the monotony of the long, long days. No physical contact, ever, with another of your kind. Friendly physical contact is so terribly important for chimpanzees. Those long, relaxed sessions of social grooming matter to them, so much.

It was when they quietened that I looked into JoJo’s eyes. I saw no hatred – that would have been easier to bear. Only puzzlement, gratitude that I had stopped to speak to him, to break the unbearable boredom of the day. I thought then of the chimpanzees of Gombe, free to roam the forests, free to play and groom and make nests in the springy branches. JoJo reached out a gentle finger and touched my cheek where the tears slid down into my laboratory mask.

How can the people working in these chimpanzee prisons tolerate the conditions there? Are they without feeling, without compassion? Are they utterly lacking in understanding? Are they sadistic, delighting in their power and control over such large and potentially dangerous creatures?

For the most part, the scientists who design the experimental conditions under which their research is to be carried out forget that they are dealing with living, sentient beings.

Unfortunately, all of us who are fighting for improved conditions in the labs are up against the Establishment. And the Establishment, typically, resists change. The Establishment pits the suffering of experimental animals against the suffering of humans. Reforms, they argue, are costly. If the chimpanzees have bigger cages, social groups, an enriched environment, and better care, it will cost more.

Some conservationists tend to forget that humans are animals too!

If a chimpanzee – one, moreover, who has been abused by humans – can reach out across the species barrier to help a human friend in need, then surely we, with our deeper capacity for compassion and understanding, can reach out to help the chimpanzees who need us, so desperately, today. Can’t we?

only by staying there, year after year, were we able to document the close, supportive and enduring bonds that grow up between family members. Moreover, had the research come to an end after a mere ten years we should never have observed the brutality that can occur during intercommunity clashes. If it had stopped after twenty years we should not have documented the touching story of little Mel’s adoption by adolescent Spindle. And who knows what the next decade will reveal? That there will be more surprises I do not doubt, for every year, from 1960 onward, has brought its own rewards in terms of new observations about chimpanzee nature, new insights into the workings of their mind. They are such complex beings, their behaviour so flexible, their individuality so pronounced.

The bizarre behaviour of Passion, infamous murderess, and her daughter Pom, would be analysed in all the criminal literature. And mothers would threaten there naughty children: ‘Passion will get you if you don’t behave’.

They would have their myths too, the chimpanzees.

They would honour the wise ones of old who first taught them how to open the ground and fashion tools for the capture of ants and termites, and how to intimidate their enemies with rocks and clubs. And the adolescents would learn how to propitiate the great god Pan, sylvan deity of all wild creatures, with...

And of course there would be a myth concerning White Ape who so suddenly appeared in their midst. Who was greeted initially with fear and anger, but whose coming led, eventually, to the provision of bananas – magical, like the dropping of manna from heaven. David Greybeard would figure in the legend, too – the one chimpa...

Often I am asked if I prefer chimpanzees to humans. The answer to that is easy – I prefer some chimpanzees to some humans, some humans to some chimpanzees! Because, of course, they are all so different. One or two whom I have known, like Humphrey and Passion, I disliked very much indeed. Others, like David Greybeard and Flo, Gilka, Fifi and Gremlin, have a very real hold on my heart, and my affection for them is close to love. But it is a love for beings who are essentially wild and free. And because I do not groom or play with them, or take part in their disputes, it is a one-sided love – they do not love me back, as does a child or a dog. This in no way diminishes what I feel for them.

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natural

*Natural mystic, Marley

All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind. A moment later Freud joined him. The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings. Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray. For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream. Were the chimpanzees expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements? Worship of the mystery of water, which seems alive; always rushing on, yet never going; always the same, yet ever different.

An endless cycle, ancient as the first trees. Old patterns repeated in ways that would always be new.

gradually, just as earlier life forms became increasingly independent of seas and lakes and rivers, so did early humans learn to live away from the forest. They found caves and fire, learned to build dwellings, to hunt with weapons, to talk. And then they became bold and arrogant. They began to hack at the outskirts of the forest itself, bending to their will that which for so long had nurtured them. Today, striding the face of the globe, humans clear the trees, lay waste the land, cover mile upon mile of rich earth with concrete. Humans tame the wilderness and plunder its riches. We believe ourselves all-powerful. But it is not so.

Thinking of this whole terrible picture, the magnitude of our sin against nature, against our fellow creatures, I was overwhelmed. How could I – or anyone – make a difference in the face of such vast and mindless destruction?

Faustino, tottering a little, moved close to me and, with his wide-eyed stare, reached to touch my hand, then wandered back to Fifi. Trust. And freedom. I thought of the countless chimpanzees who have lost their forest homes, and of the prisoners in zoos and labs around the world. I remembered the story of Old Man and how he had responded to the need of a human friend.

Evered, Freud and Frodo climbed down and, with Fifi and Faustino, moved away, deep into the peace of the forest. I watched them go, then looked back. And where the sun shone through a window in the dense vegetation, a rainbow had appeared, spanning the spray-cloud at the foot of the waterfall.

Is it not an arrogant assumption that we have the right to (for example) cut up, probe, inject, drug and implant electrodes into animals of all species simply in our attempt to learn more about what makes them tick?

Are all those who use living animals as part of standard laboratory apparatus, heartless monsters? Of course not. There may be some – there are occasional sadists in all walks of life. But they must be in the minority. The problem, as I see it, lies in the way we train young people in our society. They are victims of a kind of brainwashing that starts, only too often, in school and is intensified, in all but a few pioneering colleges and universities, throughout higher science education courses.

Because chimpanzees show intellectual abilities once thought unique to our own species, the line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, once thought to be so clear, has become blurred. Chimpanzees bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Let us hope that while medical science continues to use chimpanzees for painful or psychologically distressing experiments, we shall have the honesty to label such research for what, from the chimpanzees point of view, it certainly is – the infliction of torture on innocent victims.

For, as Albert Schweitzer said, ‘We need a boundless ethic that includes animals too.’ And at the present time our ethic, where non-human animals are concerned, is limited and confused.

If we, in the western world, see a peasant beating an emaciated old donkey, forcing it to pull an oversize load, almost beyond its strength, we are shocked and outraged. That is cruelty. But taking an infant chimpanzee from his mother’s arms, locking him into the bleak world of the laboratory, injecting him with human diseases – this, if done in the name of Science, is not regarded as cruelty.

If only we could overcome cruelty with compassion we should be well on the way to creating a new and boundless ethic – one that would respect all living beings.