Jane Goodall Quotes

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally.

Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.

I never thought I could learn much from a dog or cat. They sleep when we sleep. They eat when we eat. I'm into observing animals being as wild as they can be in a captive environment.

When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for; it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.

Animals in general have sparked a weird depression in me, because as much as I tried, I couldn't layer a personality over them. You know what I mean? I would stare at the cows, and I would sing to the cows, and they would always just look at me blankly.

You look at a herd of cattle and well, they all look the same... but they know. They all have an individual personality, and those personalities change from day to day. They can have their grumpy days and their happy days and their serene days. But it's unpredictable. You can't be off in outer space when you're dealing with animals.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.

If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with people.

I have come to know Bugs so well that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation.

Scientists have shown that pigs are capable of playing simple video games, learning from each other, and even learning names.

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it. There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.