Companion Species

Goodall is primarily concerned, in the early years captured by the movie, with a community of chimps centered around alpha male David Greybeard. The lone female of the group, Flo, captures Jane’s interest as well. For a while, Jane observes, interacts, and records the individual personalities of these spectacular primates. In the second half of the footage, though, tragedy strikes: Flo dies, leaving her children and the male chimpanzees bereft. And Jane witnesses something that undoes her prior understanding of the species: the male chimps devolve into violence.

By the end of their warring, one-third of the male chimps in the community lie dead in the river, limbs sprawled, as Goodall looks on with eyes the color of milk: glossy, tear-filled, she turns away from the camera. Her disappointment is far greater than if she had never assumed the goodness of the chimps in the first place: it is, in fact, not disappointment at all, but deep grief. I do not know what it was, for Jane, that restored her faith in the chimpanzees. I do not know how, after that blow, she regained her respect for them, but she did. Her love, though challenged, did not waver, despite witnessing for the first time the violence they were capable of, how in this way, too, they were like the humans she’d sought to avoid.

…In an excerpt from the 2015 New York Times article ‘Jane Goodall is Still Wild at Heart,’ author Paul Tullis describes Goodall’s realization in the early 90s that “there would be no…habitat” for her chimps “if poverty continued to force a growing human population to chop down trees for farmland and firewood. [It] convinced her that the chimps’ lot could not improve until that of the people living near them did.” Thus began “an abrupt career shift, from scientist to conservationist.” Suddenly, Jane’s work bridged an interesting gap.

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