Jane Goodall’s gift to us: Seeing animals as both kin and mystery

On a long-ago afternoon, at the age of I-don’t-remember-what, Jane Goodall gave me something that I realised was a gift only many years later. It was a scene in a National Geographic documentary about her work with the Gombe Stream chimpanzees in Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika). In the film, amidst the many visuals of chimps grooming and screeching at each other, brawling and meditatively munching on fruits and grub, there was one that shook me: A pair stealing and killing the baby of another member of their troop and eating it.

These were animals that I had seen, until then, as mischievous and clownish, but fundamentally benign. Received from cartoons, it was an image my childish heart had held on to, despite being introduced at a young age to nature’s brutality via wildlife document