Matt Rossell: Dr. Goodall, your life's work has made a significant impact on how people view their relationship with their non-human primate cousins. Please share with us a little bit about how attitudes have changed over the years.

Dr. Goodall: When I first went to Cambridge University in England, I had been out in the field for just over a year studying chimpanzees. I had no degree of any sort, and I was completely horrified to find that the professors and my fellow students were very disapproving of the fact that I had given the chimpanzees names, talked about them having personalities, and described how their minds worked and how they solved simple problems. Above all, they were horrified that I ascribed emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, despair, and grief to the chimpanzees.

All these things were uniquely human and not to be talked about in relation to any kind of non-human animal. Fortunately, by that time I was 26, and all through my childhood I had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior - my dog Rusty. He taught me that animals have personalities, minds, and feelings.

As I had not set out to get a Ph.D. degree but simply to learn about the chimpanzees, I wasn't intimidated [Dr. Goodall did earn a Ph.D. in ethology in 1965]. Gradually since that time in 1960, attitudes towards animals have softened in scientific communities, so we now have students who are studying animal minds. We have students studying animal emotions. And we even have people who are trying to work out ways of coming to grips with animals' personalities, so it's changed, but it still has some way to go.

Matt: In light of that change, would you comment on the attitudes of researchers conducting invasive experiments on animals.

Dr. Goodall: Researchers find it very necessary to keep blinkers on. They don't want to admit that the animals they are working with have feelings. They don't want to admit that they might have minds and personalities because that would make it quite difficult for them to do what they do; so we find that within the lab communities there is a very strong resistance among the researchers to admitting that animals have minds, personalities and feelings.

There's absolutely no question that when non-human primates are put into the tiny, barren, sterile cages that are typical of almost all medical research facilities - such as those at the Oregon Regional Primate Center - they suffer most terribly. They suffer from boredom. They suffer terribly from being kept in isolation from others of their kind because monkeys and apes are extremely social, and they suffer from depression. The same kind of clinical symptoms that a depressed human child shows are seen in many instances in monkeys and chimpanzees kept in these inhumane and shocking conditions.

Matt: After viewing videos I took inside the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, would you share with me your reactions to it?

Dr. Goodall: When I first saw the video, I was shocked, I was horrified, and I was very, very angry. The fact that today conditions such as those that I saw can still be allowed to continue - that people can go to work every day and allow such barbaric conditions to continue - is a very black mark against humanity.I have heard that there are people at the Primate Center who have suggested that the images on your video had been faked. Well, the images that I saw - a baby monkey rolling up into a ball and sucking his penis, an infant monkey with [the disease] Shigella crawling about in his own filth, an adult rhesus who was so crazy that he had bitten his arms, bitten off almost all the flesh, an individual capuchin who had been used in drug research sitting with staring eyes, clearly in the last stages of depression, a monkey strapped down and submitted to a horribly painful electro ejaculation process with electrodes strapped on his penis, just to get a semen sample - these things could not have been faked. There's no way they could have been faked. No, these monkeys were being tortured.

It made me feel particularly sickened to know that this kind of callous attitude toward animals is repeated again and again in laboratories around this country and around the world. Somehow we have to stop it.

Matt: People are outraged about the inhumane treatment, scientific fraud, and waste of tax dollars going on behind locked doors at our nation’s research facilities. What would you suggest that they do?

Dr. Goodall: I would suggest that anyone who is shocked by this cruelty should write to their senators and Congressmen, send them copies of the video, talk to people, and continue to inform themselves. Let them read Ray and Jean Greek's book Sacred Cows & Golden Geese, because that sets out much more clearly than I could the fact that so much of this research is not only cruel but wasteful.

Matt: Would you comment on the current expansion of primate research?

Dr. Goodall: When I heard that the Regional Primate Centers were expanding, that more non-human primates were to be used in various kinds of medical research and experimentation, I was deeply saddened and very shocked. It seems that we're sliding backwards in so many ways as we enter this new century. We entered it with such hope and now it seems that we're moving backwards, and this is just one more example. We shouldn't be expanding the primate research centers. We should be closing them down, all of them.

Matt: Would you comment on the public’s access to our nation’s research centers?

Dr. Goodall: It's usually pretty hard for an ordinary person to get inside one of the Primate Research Centers or anywhere where people are doing medical research on animals. And this is because the people doing that research are fearful - they don't want the general public to really know what's going on. Because they're afraid, they make it very hard for anyone to get in and see what's going on. They pretend that things are better than they are, and if somebody makes a complaint, they pretend that that person really doesn't have the scientific credentials to make those remarks.

Matt: Would you support national legislation to end primate research?

Dr. Goodall: I would definitely support legislation to end primate research and to end research on other sentient animals as well. I am currently supporting efforts of this sort not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world.

Matt: Thank you, Jane. Thank you for your compassion and amazing courage, dedication and devotion to our animal friends.


Jane Goodall is the third recipient of IDA's Lifetime Achievement Award. Other recipients of the award include David Brower and Cesar Chavez.