Walking with the Great Apes Quotes

“But perhaps, in a world “older and more complete” than ours, there is a love that does not demand a reciprocal debt of need.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas

“Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the baby.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas

“There are some scientists who frown upon such practices, believing that nature should run its course,” Jane wrote in an early chapter of The Chimpanzees of Gombe, a scholarly compilation of her first twenty-six years of work. “It seems to me, however, that humans have already interfered to such a major extent, usually in a very negative way . . . with so many animals in so many places that a certain amount of positive interference is desirable.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas

“Normally a prolonged stare from a gorilla is a threat. But Digit’s gaze bore no aggression. He seemed to say: I know. Dian would later write that she believed Digit understood she was sick.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas

“Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas modeled their approach on Jane Goodall’s: they began their studies by relinquishing control. In the masculine world of Western science, where achievement is typically measured by mastery, theirs was an unusual approach.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas

“the relationship that Jane Goodall has with the chimpanzees of Gombe—and that Dian Fossey had with the mountain gorillas she studied, and Biruté Galdikas has with the wild orangutans of Tanjung Puting—is different. There is a trust between human and animal, a privileged trust unlike any other. The contract for that trust is not written by the human: the animals are the authors of the agreement. The relationship is on the animals’ terms.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas

“I was warmly amused at the way each one tried to outdo the others in showing how her ape was the “most human”—trying to win the audience over to favor her animal. Orangutans, Biruté said, seemed the most human because of the whites of their eyes. Dian insisted that her gorillas were most humanlike because of their tight-knit family groupings. And Jane reminded us that chimps are the apes most closely related to man, sharing 99 percent of our genetic material. I was reminded of kids who insist “my dad can beat up your dad,” or of grandmothers comparing their grandchildren. None of the women would ever think of disparaging the others’ work, but each is firmly convinced that the animals she loves are the best. For they do love them.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas

“The findings that were deemed believable enough to be published, however, revolutionized ethologists’ thinking. Ethologists began to speak less often of a chasm between man and ape; they began to speak instead of a dividing “line.” And it was a line that, in the words of Harvard primatologist Irven De Vore, was “a good deal less clear than one would ever have expected.”

What makes up this line between us and our fellow primates? No longer can it be claimed to be tool use. Is it the ability to reason? Wolfgang Kohler once tested captive chimps’ reasoning ability by placing several boxes and a stick in an enclosure and hanging a banana from the high ceiling by a string. The animals quickly figured out that they could get to the banana by stacking the boxes one atop the other and then reaching to swat at the banana with a stick. (Once Geza Teleki found himself in exactly this position at Gombe. He had followed the chimpanzees down into a valley and around noon discovered he had forgotten to bring his lunch. The chimps were feeding on fruit in the trees at the time, and he decided to try to knock some fruit from nearby vines with a stick. For about ten minutes he leaped and swatted with his stick but didn’t manage to knock down any fruit. Finally an adolescent male named Sniff collected a handful of fruit, came down the tree, and dropped the fruit into Geza’s hands.)

Some say language is the line that separates man from ape. But this, too, is being questioned. Captive chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught not only to comprehend, but also to produce language. They have been taught American Sign Language (ASL), the language of the deaf, as well as languages that use plastic chips in place of words and computer languages. One signing chimp, Washoe, often combined known signs in novel and creative ways: she had not been taught the word for swan, but upon seeing one, she signed “water-bird.” Another signing chimp, Lucy, seeing and tasting a watermelon for the first time, called it a “candy-drink”; the acidic radish she named “hurt-cry-food.” Lucy would play with toys and sign to them, much as human children talk to their dolls. Koko, the gorilla protegee of Penny Patterson, used sign language to make jokes, escape blame, describe her surroundings, tell stories, even tell lies.

One of Biruté’s ex-captives, a female orangutan named Princess, was taught a number of ASL signs by Gary Shapiro. Princess used only the signs she knew would bring her food; because she was not a captive, she could not be coerced into using sign language to any ends other than those she found personally useful. Today dolphins, sea lions, harbor seals, and even pigeons are being taught artificial languages, complete with a primitive grammar or syntax. An African grey parrot named Alex mastered the correct use of more than one hundred spoken English words, using them in proper order to answer questions, make requests, do math, and offer friends and visitors spontaneous, meaningful comments until his untimely death at age 31 in 2007. One leading researcher, Ronald Schusterman, is convinced that “the components for language are present probably in all vertebrates, certainly in mammals and birds.”

Arguing over semantics and syntax, psychologists and ethologists and linguists are still debating the definitions of the line. Louis Leakey remarked about Jane’s discovery of chimps’ use of tools that we must “change the definition of man, the definition of tool, or accept chimps as man.” Now some linguists have actually proposed, in the face of the ape language experiments, changing the definition of language to exclude the apes from a domain we had considered uniquely ours.

The line separating man from the apes may well be defined less by human measurement than by the limits of Western imagination. It may be less like a boundary between land and water and more like the lines we draw on maps separating the domains of nations.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas

“Some say that Dian’s relationship with the gorillas, her feeling of oneness with them, bespoke a kind of psychological sickness. “A lot, I think, of her inexplicable sourness and unhappiness was accelerated [by the fact that] all the touchy-feely stuff with the gorillas was a need to substitute gorillas for the people in her life,” said one American conservation official who knew her. Again the voice of the skeptic: Dian had lost touch with reality, the world of people, rather than attaining a new reality, the world of nonhuman minds. “I think she entertained the thought that gorillas cared for her and were more worth her love than human beings were,” this person said. “The gorillas certainly tolerated her, but they certainly had no positive emotions with her. They were complete in their gorillahood, they had their own relationships. They had no need for her. They didn’t need her.”

Another scientist, one of Dian’s former students, said, “Some of the gorillas may have real affection for us; nonetheless they don’t like us as much as we like them, and they don’t understand us as well as we understand them.”

But perhaps, in a world “older and more complete” than ours, there is a love that does not demand a reciprocal debt of need. Certainly Dian needed the gorillas. But perhaps the gorillas understood Dian better than any human ever did.

Ian Redmond told a story at the National Geographic memorial benefit for Dian. He hadn’t planned to tell it; it was prompted by a question: how did the gorillas react to Dian’s death?

“This goes beyond the bounds of strict science,” Ian said. “Just after Dian’s death, three gorilla groups who had been at some distance from Visoke suddenly homed in on the mountain. One group traveled almost continually for two days to arrive in the vicinity.” Ian is a scientist and would not want to volunteer the interpretation implicit in the gorillas’ sudden, purposeful movement toward the mountain that was Dian’s home: that they had come, in her hour of death, to be near to her.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas

“Both Biruté and Jane are firmly rooted in the world of human endeavor. Jane has not become a chimp; Biruté has not become an orangutan. Yet the lives of all three women have been transformed by their visions; they are inexorably linked to the other nations through which they have traveled. In a sense they are, in the words of Henry Beston, living by voices we shall never hear; they are gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained. You need only listen to Jane’s excitement at seeing “a tree laden with luscious fruit”—fruit that to human senses is so tart it prompts a grimace. You need only remember how Dian would sing to the gorillas a gorilla song—praising the taste of rotting wood. You need only imagine what goes through Biruté’s mind when she does the “fruit stare” of the orangutan.

Western scientists do not like to talk about these things, for to do so is to voice what for so long has been considered unspeakable. The bonds between human and animal and the psychic tools of empathy and intuition have been “coded dark” by Western science—labeled as hidden, implicit, unspoken. The truths through which we once explained our world, the truths spoken by the ancient myths, have been hushed by the louder voice of passionless scientific objectivity.

But perhaps we are rediscovering the ancient truths. In his book Life of the Japanese Monkeys, the renowned Japanese primate researcher Kawai Masao outlines a new concept, upon which his research is built: he calls it kyokan, which translates as “feel-one.” He struck upon the concept after observing a female researcher on his team interacting with female Japanese macaques. “We [males] had always found it more difficult to distinguish among female [macaques],” he wrote. “However, a female researcher who joined our study could recognize individual females easily and understood their behavior, personality and emotional life better. . . . I had never before thought that female monkeys and women could immediately understand each other,” he wrote. “This revelation made me feel I had touched upon the essence of the feel-one method.”

Masao’s book, unavailable to Western readers until translated into English by Pamela Asquith in 1981, explains that kyokan means “becoming fused with the monkeys’ lives where, through an intuitive channel, feelings are mutually exchanged.” Embodied in the kyokan approach is the idea that it is not only desirable to establish a feeling of shared life and mutual attachment with the study animals—to “feel one” with them—but that this feeling is necessary for proper science, for discovering truth. “It is our view that by positively entering the group, by making contact at some level, objectivity can be established,” Masao wrote.

Masao is making a call for the scientist to return to the role of the ancient shaman: to “feel one” with the animals, to travel within their nations, to allow oneself to become transformed, to see what ordinary people cannot normally see. And this, far more than the tables of data, far more than the publications and awards, is the pioneering achievement of Jane Goodall, Biruté Galdikas, and Dian Fossey: they have dared to reapproach the Other and to sanctify the unity we share with those other nations that are, in Beston’s words, “caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
― Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas