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  • 4 months ago
Jane Goodall, the renowned conservationist and animal welfare advocate who was seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees after spending decades studying them in the wild in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, has died. She was 91. According to a statement on Wednesday, Oct. 1, from her eponymous institute, she died Los Angeles of natural causes while on a speaking tour. She leaves behind her son, Hugo, and three grandchildren.

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00:00If I look back, I think the path that I've taken has led me to where I am now and I was lucky
00:08from a very early age. I knew where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do and I followed that path.
00:30Ever since I was 10, I wanted to go to Africa, live with wild animals and write books about them.
00:38And it seemed impossible, didn't have any money, girls didn't do that sort of thing.
00:43This was 70 years ago, except my mother.
00:47If you really want something, work hard, take advantage of opportunity and never give up.
00:52And that was the way I was brought up.
00:55So when I was 23, I got this letter from a school friend inviting me to Kenya for a holiday.
01:02I heard about and met the great, late Louis Leakey,
01:06went to work as his secretary because I had not been to college at that time.
01:11And that led to him offering me this extraordinary opportunity,
01:14going to live, not with any animal, but the one most like us, the chimpanzee.
01:25For me to have these chimpanzees coming so close, when they'd been running away for so long,
01:34was like total magic.
01:36And, you know, I got to see them really close up.
01:39And for the very first time, I could follow the development almost day by day of a chimpanzee infant.
01:46So I had a lot of fun with Grubb when he was little, and I did a lot of the things that chimp mothers do as well.
02:12My remaining years, I don't know how many I have.
02:26You know, I'm already 91.
02:28But I'm really working on growing, growing, growing roots and shoots across the world.
02:34We certainly need people coming together, as long as they come together to do the right thing.
02:50I know.
03:06I know.
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