Jane Goodall has no illusions about chimpanzees, she tells The Wall Street Journal. The world’s most renowned primatologist has made the acquaintance of literally hundreds of chimps since 1960, and still counts several as “close friends.” Her “favorite chimpanzee of all time” was David Graybeard. “David lost his fear of me before the others,” she recalls. “He became the first chimpanzee to take a banana from my hand, accepting an offering of friendship from a member of a different species.”
Now 76, she’s learned to keep a healthy distance from the animals she studies. “They can be loving and compassionate, and yet they have a dark side,” she says. She’s seen rival groups of chimpanzees engage in deadly warfare, and has observed adults kill and eat infants. She was even attacked recently, by a male called Frodo. “He almost killed me, dragging me to the edge of a cliff,” she says. Despite the risks, Goodall still insists on walking the jungle alone for hours on end, and chuckles at the thought of what the press would say if something happened to her. “It would be quite a story, wouldn’t it?” she says, laughing. “Jane Goodall killed by chimpanzee!”
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