Dr. Jane Goodall: 'I'm not going to fight for animal rights; there's no point'

[Guest guest]

http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/461445/dr_jane_goodall_im_not_going_to_fi\

ght_for_animal_rights_theres_no_point.html

 

<http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/461445/dr_jane_goodall_im_not_going_to_f\

ight_for_animal_rights_theres_no_point.html>Dr.

Jane Goodall: 'I'm not going to fight for animal rights; there's no point'

 

Laura Sevier

 

12th April, 2010

The renowned primatologist and conservationist on the need for scientific

empathy, the impact of economic development, and why children give her hope

for the future

 

*Laura Sevier: The list of endangered species around the world is growing.

There is often a sense of hopelessness and doom and gloom surrounding

conservation. In your latest book Hope for Animals and Their World you take

a more hopeful approach by emphasising the positive. Is this designed to

inspire conservationists around the world not to give up in the face of so

much adversity?*

 

*Jane Goodall:* It's to try and give hope to the young aspiring biologists

so that they don't get persuaded to do something different - because

everybody's telling them that what with climate change and everything we're

certainly heading for ecological collapse.

 

I do think we are reaching a point of no return - but we haven't got there

yet. And the point is, we can't predict the future. For all we know, half

the human population on the planet might die of some terrible new disease.

We just don't know.

 

*LS: The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of

Biodiversity. What needs to happen on a wide scale for wildlife to be

protected? Or is it a case of species by species as you show in the book?*

 

*JG:* Somehow we have to wake people up. What I'm concentrating on is youth.

My youth programme, Jane Goodall's Roots &

Shoots<http://www.rootsnshoots.org.uk/>(for

young people of all ages from pre-school through college) is about giving

people hope. I think it's criminal not to give children hope because they

are born with hope and we have to nurture that.

 

Also children are brilliant at changing the behaviour of their parents. Of

course it's also necessary to work with decision makers and legislators and

teachers but it is working with children that gives me the greatest hope.

 

*LS: What are the main obstacles conservationists face trying to save

species from**extinction?*

 

*JG:* Bureaucracy is one of them. I have talked with many biologists who

have a clear idea as to what should be done to save a species from

extinction, but they have to go through trials and tests to get proof. And

while they do this, precious individual animals are dying and the overall

situation getting grimmer.

 

Another major obstacle is the constant battle with economic development. Yet

another is the lack of understanding of the general public.

 

*LS: How can we persuade people to care about 'creepy crawlies' or species

considered to be dangerous such as wolves and crocodiles?*

 

*JG:* Probably again through their children. I don't think there's a recipe

you can spread out to say ‘this is what you can do to change people's minds'

because people are so different.

 

Often it is really hard. Overall, though, I've found that the best way for

me to change people's attitude is by telling stories. If you can find a

story to illustrate how a tiny seemingly insignificant bug can contribute to

the health of an eco-system, then that gets through to people.

 

*LS: The stories in your book illustrate the determination of the men and

women who fight - sometimes for decades - to save the last survivors of a

species. What story most moved you?*

 

*JG:* The Black Robin, without any question. At one time there was only one

fertile female of her species. She and her mate were the Adam and Eve of

their species. Now there's about 400. I think that's an amazing story - and

it was in the wild, no captive breeding.

 

Don Merton, the biologist who saved them, loves the birds, and he doesn't

mind saying he loves them. He talks about them in such a good way. He is a

wonderful person, and it's a story that hardly seems credible and yet it's

true.

 

*LS: In conservation, emotional involvement with one's subject is considered

inappropriate by many scientists. Do you think that a paradigm shift in this

view is one of the keys to conservation?*

 

*JG:* I do. I've fought for that my entire career right from the beginning

when I was accepted by Cambridge University. It is a fallacy that you can't

be empathetic and objective at the same time - of course you can. It's

simply a question of discipline. It is how science should be taught.

 

But of course, science wasn't taught that way back then (and mostly it is

not even now). If a student felt empathy with a little frog, then he or she

would be unwilling to de-pith it. So students are taught to suppress their

natural empathy, be objective and not worry about what the animal is

feeling, or might be feeling. This was the teaching that created the Nazis.

 

*LS: Your research into chimpanzees showed humans are not the only beings

with personalities, rational thought and emotions. Is the scientific

community starting to take more seriously studies about the emotional lives

of animals and a view of them as intelligent,* *sentient beings?*

 

*JG:* I think it's certainly more widespread. Most of the resistance is from

those scientists who are doing unpleasant things to animals, or from hunters

and people working in intensive farms or abattoirs and so on because they

don't want to believe that animals have these feelings. It makes it

difficult to do their job.

 

*LS: Do you think that animals should have rights?*

 

*JG:* I personally am never going to fight for rights *per se*. All this

fighting for human rights and yet we abuse them everyday, all around the

world. So while we're still abusing human rights is it really going to help

the animals? It won't harm them to have rights. I would always say 'good

show' to the people who fight for them. My approach is different. I'm

fighting for human responsibility.

 

So my job is to make people think of animals differently - as they really

are. You can have a law - and we're surrounded by laws - but it's so often

possible to get around them - they are continually being broken. So I want

people to understand that animals really do have personalities and feelings

- so that they want to obey laws that protect them.

 

*LS: Do you think that conservation and agriculture can be harmonious and go

hand in hand or does one have to be at the expense of the other?*

 

No, we have to try to return to some of the old ways. For hundreds of years

nature and agriculture lived side by side. And then, with the advent of

agribusiness, everything changed. But now, in the UK, farmers are being

asked to put their hedges back.

 

But there are so many problems to overcome as conservation comes up against

vested interests. It seems to me that we've lost that wisdom that people

used to have, especially the indigenous people. They used to ask: ‘How will

this decision that we make today affect our people in the future?' Now we

make decisions based on: ‘How does it affect me, now? How does it affect the

next shareholders meeting, three months ahead? How does it affect my next

political campaign?'

 

Don't we care about our children? Of course we do. But there seems to be a

disconnect between our so clever brain (after all, we have got people onto

the moon!) and the human heart, the seat of love and compassion, which

should ground us to the planet we live on. It simply doesn't make sense that

the most intellectually smart creature that has ever walked on planet Earth

is destroying its only home, and destroying it so heedlessly. So how do we

mend the damaged connection between brain and heart? Through the youth, I

think.

 

*Hope for Animals and Their World is out now (£17.99, Icon Books)*

 

 

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