Jane Goodall and Roger Short (and a banana-eating friend) reflect on 40 years of friendship.
Credit: Mary Lewis: Jane Goodall Institute
Their friendship between the British environmentalist and the Melbourne University professor began in Cambridge in the 1960s. Jane had already had an explosive impact on the staid discipline of ethology (or animal behaviour) with her findings on the wild chimpanzees of Gombe reserve, Tanzania. In the space of a year, the lithe 25-year-old blonde, armed only with her determination and acute observational powers, overturned the dogma dividing chimpanzee from humans. 'Man' had been defined as the toolmaker. But Goodall showed chimpanzees were toolmakers too. And they hunted for meat and had highly individual personalities replete with human-like emotions.
Clearly the author of such groundbreaking discoveries needed academic qualifications, so to Cambridge Goodall went. It was not a place populated by soul mates. Her fellow ethologists did not see animal as individuals. They gave them numbers not names (as she did), and much of their research involved experimenting on them. And she was roundly criticised for the sin of anthropomorphising animals: attributing humanlike behaviours to them (see COSMOS Magazine, Issue 9, p82) .
But in the bright-eyed Roger Short, Goodall found a soul mate - for life. Short, then a laboratory head, had a great interest in the sexual behaviour of the magnificent red deer from the isle of Rhum in Scotland. Goodall's intuitive interpretation of chimp behaviour instantly struck a cord with him. Unlike his colleagues, he did not consider Goodall's naming of the chimps a sin. He began naming his stags: Ravel, Crusader, Aristotle ... and so on.
Later inspired by the intrepid Goodall, he went to study wild elephants in Uganda. He was one of the few people to witness the birth of a wild baby elephant, and observe how females ring the labouring mother in a protective cordon.
Goodall went back to Gombe and, with the students who now flocked from around the world, she continued to enthral, astound and shock the world with stories of chimpanzee behaviour.
And she shocked herself, too. Although chimps were so like us, she had thought that they were a nicer version. But then the main group she was studying splintered to form two adjoining clans and what followed was all-out warfare until the last male, female and child of the splinter group were annihilated. As Jane reflected, "my garden of Eden changed overnight to a very dark jungle."
Goodall's approach to ethology treated chimps as individuals, and made use of human intuition to interpret chimp behaviour. It was a far cry from the orthodox approach, where the observer maintains an arm's length, clinical, descriptive style. And while many wildlife researchers today are clearly influenced by her - most use names and universities teach courses in animals emotions and personality – Goodall is still on the defensive.
"The point is they [chimps] share 99 per cent of our DNA and our brain structure - so why shouldn't they share our behaviours?" she asks, taking a break from a recent tour of Australia. "You use your intuition, but then you go back and check whether your interpretation was right. Sometimes it's the perfect jump off point for a scientific investigation. Does it happen again in the same context?"
But decades ago both Goodall and Short left their beloved animal research: Short's turning point came in the late 1960s. In the course of a conversation with Peter Scott, then president of the World Wild Fun for Nature, Scott's eyes took on a far away look and he said: "I set up the WWF to save endangered species. I've spent millions and failed. If we'd have put all that money into condoms we'd have done better."
That comment was the trigger that directed Short's attention to his own species. He went on to head a human fertility research centre in Edinburgh. Here he discovered the natural role breast-feeding plays in limiting human fertility. In traditional human groups, mothers who suckled on demand gave birth only once every four years. When he consulted Goodall, she could report that amongst her chimpanzee mothers (who also suckled on demand) they similarly gave birth only once every five years.
That entry into the study of human fertility ultimately led Short to the nightmare of AIDS, and his tireless pursuit of strategies to tackle the disease in Africa and Asia (see COSMOS Magazine, Issue 7, p62).
But in Edinburgh, Short also indulged his fascination with primates, and it was their sexual behaviour that intrigued him. A staggering difference between gorillas and chimpanzees is the relative size of their genitalia. Not a question all scientists would linger on, but for Short a compelling mystery. For all its bulk, the gorilla has tiny testicles and an erect penis that reaches a maximum length of 2 cm. By contrast the relatively diminutive chimp has genitalia five times larger.
