Jane Goodall: The Chimpanzee Who Died of a Broken Heart

Dr. Jane Goodall explains to Ard Louis how the pet chimpanzee he had as a child when growing up in Gabon, Africa, might have died of a broken heart.
Part of a conversation for the 'Why Are We Here?' documentary series. https://www.whyarewehere.tv/
For more Jane Goodall clips and other resources go to whyarewehere.tv/people/jane-goodall/

FIRST PART OF TRANSCRIPT
Ard: So, Jane, it’s an enormous pleasure for me to meet you. I’ve admired you from a distance for a long time. I want to tell you a little bit about my own story with chimpanzees. So I grew up in Gabon, in Central Africa, and my parents are biologists, and when I was about two – we lived in the jungle – the local hunters had shot a chimpanzee without realising that it had a little baby, a few weeks old, still clinging to its mother. So they brought it to us and my father bought it for its weight in sardines, and so we raised it with a bottle that was at home. You know, gave it a bottle and kind of raised it. He was like a brother to me. His name was Bertje. Here’s a picture of us in the back garden.

JG: You and Bertja?

Ard: Bertje, yeah.

JG: Bertje? Bertie?

Ard: Yeah, Bertie. Bertje is in Dutch. And he was like a brother to my sister and I. He’s just about two. I think he’s about two when I was about four, or maybe three. And it was just amazing having a chimpanzee.

JG: They’re so like children.

Ard: They’re so like children.

JG: But then what happened to him?

Ard: He lived with us for a few years and then when he was about five years old we brought him to a nature reserve where they tried to bring him back into the wild. But unfortunately he got ill at some point and he…

JG: This is the tragedy of these young chimps: very cute, very sweet and… There’s a pet trade in them now. It’s happened in the US where a man, a scientist, Kellogg, he actually brought up a chimp with his son, Donald, as an experiment. But then when the chimp stopped being cute and sweet, he was thrown into a lab and…

Ard: Oh, that’s really sad.

JG: The end is always sad.

Ard: Yeah, I was very sad. I mean, for us it wasn’t because he wasn’t… He was still cute and sweet. We were moving on, and so we…

JG: Yeah, well that’s the problem, and these humanised chimps, they can almost never be reintroduced.

Ard: Okay.

JG: No, unless they’re with a whole group.

Ard: Unless they’re brought in as a group?

JG: Yes.

Ard: So this was the President’s reserve, and the hope was that they would be able to reintroduce him back. I mean, he was a particularly intelligent… It doesn’t work?

JG: Very doubtful.

Ard: So what should we have done, then? Because he was a few weeks old and he would have died.

JG: Well, no. You did the right thing: you took him and you looked after him. There was nowhere for you to put that little chimp.

Ard: No, I felt very attached to it. I really thought he was like a brother, and we played and he was very… He liked to play hide-and-seek and… Here I have a photo of he and I playing together in the sand pit. He was just very, very, playful and… Here he is with my sister. He and my sister were exactly the same age, and they had a very close bond that I was actually a little jealous of.

So my mother says although we look different, we behaved remarkably similarly. You know, in the morning we fed him porridge and he’d eat with a spoon, which he didn’t actually really like. So if you turned around, he would eat with his hands.

JG: Yes.

Ard: And when you looked back he’d grab the spoon as if, ‘Of course, I’ve been eating with my spoon the entire time.’

David: That’s quite clever, isn’t it?

Ard: It’s really clever, yeah. He knew what was going on; he could sense things. One of his favourite things of all was to untie knots. So here we have a photo of him untying a shoe.

JG: Oh, yes, well that’s very typical chimp. Many, many zoo chimps, if they get the chance, they’ll spend a lot of time untying your shoes and trying to knot them again.

David: Really?

Ard: It’s amazing. In fact it used to bother me. I didn’t wear shoes that often, but if I did, he would grab them. And then I remember my mother said I once came in very upset because I said, ‘He’s taken my shoes off, but he has hands and feet.’ So I grabbed his hands and pulled them off, but he’d grab them with his feet and then… ‘It’s not fair! He’s got four hands.’

Continues ......