Home > Work > Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas
1 " 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, Birute Galdikas
2 " But perhaps, in a world “older and more complete” than ours, there is a love that does not demand a reciprocal debt of need. "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "
