Beyond her landmark chimpanzee research, Goodall condemned factory farming and animal experiments as moral atrocities.
Most people know Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist who died on Wednesday at 91, for her singular, field-defining work on wild chimpanzees. She first entered the field in the early 1960s with no formal academic training, at a time when influential scientific frameworks like behaviorism often viewed animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Unencumbered by scientific orthodoxy, Goodall helped the world see chimps as socially and cognitively sophisticated creatures. Her work opened up space for scientists to understand animals as beings with interiority (although even today, that approach is far from universally embraced).
But Goodall also devoted herself to something even more radical, and far rarer for scientists of her international stature. Goodall’s recognition of animals’ capacities was not just an abstract academic finding but a practical ethic and moral imperative that led her to advocate for veganism, meat reduction, and animal rights. She despaired at the horrors of factory farming, calling it “amongst the worst atrocities ever perpetrated by humanity,” and she vocally opposed invasive animal experimentation, particularly on primates — a commitment that sometimes put her at odds with fellow scientists who believe that experimenting on animals remains essential to scientific discovery.
