Jane Goodall greets the audience by imitating a chimpanzee, then launches into an hour-long talk on her relationship with apes and how, from being a primatologist, she became an activist to protect them. At 78, Goodall, who has 53 years of studying chimps behind her, is still criss-crossing the planet to raise awareness of populations and their leaders on the fate of the apes and the need to protect the environment. “I haven’t been more than two or three weeks in one place at one time for the past 25 years,” she said. It all started with a conference on chimpanzees that she attended in the US in the 1980s. There were sessions on the ethics of chimps being used in medical research, habitat destruction and chimps caught in snares and the beginning of the bush meat trade. “I went in as a scientist happily learning about chimpanzee behaviour… but I left that conference as an activist,” she recounted.
