Jane Goodall and our search for ourselves in animals

Not very long ago, humans saw themselves as special animals because they could use tools.

- MANU JOSEPH

But in 1960, British scientist Jane Goodall observed that chimpanzees could use blades of grass to extract termites from a nest, to eat them. Goodall, who died on Wednesday, would go on to become one of the most popular scientists in the world. A part of what made her endearing to ordinary people, though, infuriated her own scientific establishment. She named the chimps she was studying instead of maintaining an objective distance by numbering them, thus humanizing them, a perilous thing to do in the study of animal behaviour. She defended her method through more sacrilege, saying that individual chimps had personalities, and that they could feel many things that were then considered unique to humans, like joy, grief and jealousy. She even observed that they could organize and go to war against rivals.

For long, the Western view was that animals were incapable of emotion—they only had mindless instinct. René Descartes considered them complex machines. Goodall is greatly responsible for changing that opinion. Even so, the most regressive part of the study of animal behaviour is that humans keep looking for humans in animals.