Page 29 - FWG Issue 3_April_2022

Nature

its mores, went ahead anyway and gave in 1965. He named all his study animals.
her study group individual names. And there was George Schaller from
Alaska, with his Year of the Gorilla (1965).
Who can forget her David Greybeard? It He also used names but only in his
was by watching this big male fashion a book in which he drew attention to the
stick to ‘fish’ for ants down an opening irrefutable similarities between human
in a termite heap, that Goodall was able society and that of other mammals.
to demolish the long-held belief that Douglas-Hamilton and Schaller drew
humans were the only mammals that attention to the fact that mammals, like
made tools. Chimps were considered to humans, display emotion and altruism.
be vegetarians until Goodall witnessed
them hunting for meat, including the But ethology was still male-orientated
occasional small antelope and monkeys and, unsurprisingly, researchers were still
which they would corner by team effort. inclined to concentrate on the role of the
They then shared the meat among their male as the dominant sex.
associates.
An anthology published in 1998 - Intimate
And who can forget Flo? Flo, the mother Nature: the bond between women and
chimp who, after two years of seeing an animals, referred to “Ground-breaking
unresponsive Goodall being around, sat field studies by women scientists (which
next to her and tentatively reached out have) changed the way the world sees
her hand to touch her. animals”.

That was most certainly a cathartic The book’s American editors, Linda
moment in the history of ethology. Hogan, Deena Metzger and Brenda
Peterson, came to the conclusion that we
In the Shadow of Man had an enormous have become increasingly separated from
impact on the reading public as well as animals and from the natural world in
among scientists. general. Their book, intended to be more
literary than scientific, said, “For centuries
Men had founded the relatively new now, male priests, doctors and scientists
science of ethology and indeed several have declared . . . creatures have no soul,
had produced some highly readable no capacity for pain, or emotion”.
books. One remembers a best-seller on
wild elephants by Iain Douglas-Hamilton But “female scientists were replacing the
hard, objective eye of the past with one
of a softer sight, replacing a concept of
anthropomorphism with one of empathy”.

More and more women were now
roughing it in the wilds, the Goodall
way. They wanted to be as close and
unobtrusive as possible to the animals
they were studying. It was inferred that
men, by default rather than intent, paid
too little attention to the fundamental
influences that female animals had on the
social behaviour of their species. This was
despite the fact that most of the higher
mammal societies they were studying
were in fact matriarchal.

Among the fundamental topics that
male researchers tended to overlook
were motherhood, social bonds, and
the vital role of female animals in the
development of the young. Judging by
the volume of books on animal behaviour
since the ‘80s, it is evident that female
Vlad Kutepov, Unsplash
scientists approached the subject with

Fourways Gardens • 27 • April 2022