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A STUDENT OF AFRICAN WILDLIFE
It is 5:45 am and the sun is just rising over Gombe National Park in East Africa. Following Jane's way of studying chimps, our group are all going to visit them in the forest. Jane has studied these families of chimps for many years and helped people understand how much they behave like humans. Watching a family of chimps wake up is our first activity of the day. This means going back to the place where we left the family sleeping in a tree the night before. Everybody sits and waits in the shade of the trees while the family begins to wake up and move off. Then we follow as they wander into the forest. Most of the time, chimps either feed or clean each other as a way of showing love in their family. Jane warns us that our group is going to be very tired and dirty by the afternoon and she is right. However, the evening makes it all worthwhile. We watch the mother chimp and her babies play in the tree. Then we see them go to sleep together in their nest for the night. We realize that the bond between members of a chimp family is as strong as in a human family.
Nobody before Jane fully understood chimp behaviour. She spent years observing and recording their daily activities. Since her childhood she had wanted to work with animals in their own environment. However, this was not easy. When she first arrived in Gombe in 1960, it was unusual for a woman to live in the forest. Only after her mother came to help her for the first few months was she allowed to begin her project. Her work changed the way people think about chimps. For example, one important thing she discovered was that chimps hunt and eat meat. Until then everyone had thought chimps ate only fruit and nuts. She actually observed chimps as a group hunting a monkey and then eating it. She also discovered how chimps communicate with each other, and her study of their body language helped her work out their social system.
For forty years Jane Goodall has been outspoken about making the rest of the world understand and respect the life of these animals. She has argued that wild animals should be left in the wild and not used for entertainment or advertisements. She has helped to set up special places where they can live safely. She is leading a busy life but she says: "Once I stop, it all comes crowding in and I remember the chimps in laboratories. It's terrible. It affects me when I watch the wild chimps. I say to myself, 'Aren't they lucky?" And then I think about small chimps in cages though they have done nothing wrong. Once you have seen that you can never forget ..."
She has achieved everything she wanted to do: working with animals in their own environment, gaining a doctor's degree and showing that women can live in the forest as men can. She inspires those who want to cheer the achievements of women.
