– Don't blame the bats for the Coronavirus | Dr. Jane Goodall | SVT/TV 2/Skavlan

do viruses from wild animals have the potential to end humanity and whose fault would that be we will now be talking to dr. Jane Goodall and living legend 60 years ago she went to Tanzania to study chimpanzees a groundbreaking research still the 86 year-old doctor travels 300 days a year and is more or less impossible to get ahold of if it wasn't for the lockdown lucky for us thank you so much for taking the time you're right now you are in Bournemouth right yes I'm in Bournemouth I've been here it was lucky I mean I could have been anywhere in the world when we were all locked down but luckily I was here and I was actually stepping into a cab to go to the airport to start the tour and I got this frantic message it's been cancelled funny but you know I could have been anywhere and luckily I'm here where you're from originally well we moved here when the war began I was five years old and so I grew up here and you know I'm surrounded by the books I read as a child and outside of the trees I climbed as a child so it really is my roots here we we have a common situation in the world now and the world has blamed the bats who do you blame I blame us um the bats are perfectly fine if they're left alone where they belong but the trouble is we've invaded their habitat we are destroying the forests where they live we thus come in closer contact with them and usually it's the bat infecting some other animal because they all being crowded together and then that jumps in to us and creates yet another one which is bad for us but it's after all part of the problem is these wildlife markets the so called wet markets where they are dealing with wild animals right yeah well most wit markets actually don't sell wildlife so we really should talk about wildlife food markets the treatment is horrendous and the conditions you know both the vendor and the customer could get contaminated with feces with urine with blood because often these animals are killed on the spot so it's it's the wildlife meat markets of Asia and the bush meat markets in Africa and then this our intensive farming and that too has been the origin of a good number of diseases in in us how would you if if we were to persuade people to quit this practice with with the wildlife food markets how would you go about convincing them I think many people and I know most about China most people in China are against eating wild animals the problem is you know when you solve one problem it's often creates another one and the problem here is that many people depend on this for their livelihood so we have to very carefully think through what can they do to make money to make a livelihood for themselves and we met it in Africa by working with local communities helping them find ways of living without destroying the environment because not only is it harmful for our health but but it's horribly cruel to the animals and we now know that they have feelings of fear they certainly can feel pain and depressed just like us according to the US Secretary of State by Papale it's not about the the white mark is the wildlife markets it's it's it's a virus that comes from a Chinese lab and he claims to have evidence that proves this I don't believe it's escaped from a lab unless they can prove provide evidence that very clearly shows how and when and what route it took but because I mean this wouldn't be the first time that we can see viruses spilling over from animals to humans right no absolutely I mean there was another one the bird flu that started in another wildlife market in China but then there was hiv/aids that began from killing and eating chimpanzees in Africa in two different places and then was the the wild birds contaminating pink sand and fix in Iowa where another epidemic started so you know it's certainly not just China it's certainly proven that these viruses do spill over and the bacteria spill over from wildlife into us in conditions usually that we've created you you've seen the opposite as well that animals can get if infected by humans I'm thinking about the polio that you could you could witness chimpanzees get can you can you tell us about that yeah it was absolutely dreadful and fortunately the polio epidemic actually began in the nearby town and the first examples of chimps dragging limbs were seen way down to the south far away from us but this interaction between chimpanzees of different groups the females move so we assume that this is how the polio disease got into the chimps we were studying but it was absolutely ghastly in what way well one would come in dragging both legs and the other chimps were frightened they kept away they were nervous they stared they couldn't understand it so in a way that that's an example of social distancing in that case because of fear but I think some human beings too are fearful I mean I meet people out in the street you know everybody Dodgers who's going to go out into the road who's going to stay on that on the pavement and in some people's eyes yeah let's talk a bit about the chimpanzees you I mean after all this is this summer it's 60 years since you first met them can you can you try to describe that connection that you could feel immediately with the chimpanzees well it would have to be the same if you're talking about you and me it would have to be a connection where we communicated without words so actually you can communicate quite a bit with people without words when you meet somebody from another culture you don't share a language because the gestures and the postures are actually virtually identical between us and chimpanzees so when you're talking about communicating you can do it in a sort of telepathic way I think but also we can communicate with those gestures and questions of kind of language that probably began before humans invented words and that's the biggest difference I think I mean I continue with words about things that you don't know I couldn't do that if it was only gestures and postures dr. Goodall did you did you ever met a chimp that you didn't like yes I did that much to like humans that's the problem people think they're my favorite animals but not because they're too like people you know some chimpanzees I love and some I didn't like at all they're bullies and aggressive to each other and they're just not nice which one was the baddest I think Frodo Fifi's second son sorry her fourth son and the problem with Frodo was that he had a very strong high-ranking family so when he was growing up he was a spoiled brat so he had one older brother and then he had two uncles and his grandmother was the top-ranking Mellors mother Fifi was getting pretty high ranking so he could challenge all kinds of high ranking individuals because he knew that have you gotten to trouble one of his family would come and rescue him did he ever did he ever create a problem for you well he dragged me and stamped on me and he did that to some other people but he wasn't trying to hurt or harm me because if he had then I wouldn't be here now I mean he could easily have killed me or disabled me he was just showing off proving he was dominant and I kept saying Frodo I know you're dominant I mean I didn't say it but I was thinking you stupid idiot don't you know that I totally submit to you but once like trying to chimp gesture which was silly because we don't communicate with them but a chimpanzee who's afraid will reach out so when he came by with all his hair bristling I looking at me with that look which would definitely meant I'm going to charge you and I did this to him and I think that made it much worse so you never really made friends with roto not really but you know there were times been this aggressive bully you'd watch him playing with little infants and he was so gentle and you know I had to tell myself he's a chimpanzee he's not a person he's thinking differently and so I mean there are some humans that you despise maybe I can even say ain't not the Jews I don't hate they never ate it through do you you you were quite early to prove that these animals can be aggressive but but can they be evil no I think the difference is to me humans are capable of evil because we can deliberately and in cold blood plan to torture someone for to give an example and a chimpanzee and other animals to they were react in a way that causes pain and suffering with it spontaneous it's not something where you sit and think I know what to do I don't think of a terrible way to make that person suffer I'll make them two'll that's evil when when did you become a more aware of this after the chimpanzee what I call the four year war and it was when one community started invading the territory of a smaller community to the south and attacking them and killing them one by one they never killed them outright they're not strong enough or something but they left them to die of their wounds and what made it particularly horrible was that these individuals they were attacking had been part of one big group which split so it was like a civil war and I think civil wars in our society - at the worst because you know you're you're attacking people who formerly were your friends and it's it's a strange mentality one of our field staff at Gumby we have them from the - - persuasions Christian and Muslim and one of the Christian came up to me they went out in pairs and he's white under his skin and he said I grew up with Hasani I think we played together as children but he's told me if there's a fat one I will have to kill you what what you've done more than anyone is to get us to care about wild animals by appealing to our hearts and this has been extremely effective through the years especially with the chimpanzees of course but but then then you have less appealing animals you have that maybe animals without the cute eyes or I mean take a turkey they suffer - I wonder how - how can we get get the world to care about as well well that's actually interestingly it's my next major project if I can get away from all these interviews and I've been given a grant to try and raise awareness around the world about the sentience of different animals and the way you know the most the best way to do this is through storytelling but also through videos and so I'm actually collecting up those videos that come on YouTube to share and hopefully lots of young people will watch so the idea is to to focus on the individual animal making it giving it the personality that that you you claimed it has but you don't give it you share it their personalities anybody whose own dogs or cats know they're all different and so people who don't have that relationship with animals maybe don't understand it and I talk to people about factory farming tell them a bit you know what happens and any of them say don't tell me I don't want to listen I'm very sensitive I love animals and then they go on eating them Jane you have a dog yourself is that the closest you come to wildlife in Bournemouth well no there's an awful lot of birds and there's three pigeons outside my window right now and one of the members in our household feeds them so they're very tame but this dog that we have now he's not my dog he's a rescue and he's a whippet and with bits and more like cats I love him because he's an animal rather than because he's a dog but you know all my first real understanding of animal behavior came from the very special dog I had as a child and he's always with me and this this is rusty he was my childhood companion and he taught me but animals have personalities and intelligence and emotions and so when when I finally got to Cambridge to do a PhD and the professors told me but I couldn't talk about chimpanzees having personalities minds or emotions I knew from Rusty as well as of course for the chimpanzees but this was rubbish of course they do and they've managed to prove that all kinds of I mean rats and mice the most widely used in medical research they've now proved that they can feel pain they can feel fear and yet the way they're treated is given the title of the documentary about about your life on National Geographic now it's called the hope what is your hope for the best possible outcome of this situation well I certainly hope that we find ways of closing down the world life meat markets around the planet and find ways for people to make a living without hunting killing eating torturing animals and I hope also that perhaps we could think about not eating meat or at least not eating meat from these intensively farmed animals because not only is it desperately cruel but it's it's destroying huge areas of environment and lots of fossil to grow the grain to feed all these billions of animals and then lots of trussell fuel to get the grain to the animals the animals to the abattoir and the meat to the table added to which we use a lot of water and water is becoming scarce fresh water all over the planet to change vegetarian to change vegetable to animal protein and they produce methane gas in their digestion which is a very virulent greenhouse gas and climate change is actually a far more frightening thing right now than this pandemic this pandemic will go away doesn't actually kill that many people but if we don't address climate change with as much bigger as people are addressing this pandemic then the globe will heat up and we will reach of time I don't know when when basically everywhere is not habitable to humans so you know we've got to address the climate crisis too and hopefully this wakes us up a little bit we're vulnerable and we really need to learn to understand that we are part of the natural world and not separate from it and we rely on it clean air for clean water we rely on forests to regulate the temperature and to regulate rainfall so we've just got to start thinking differently and maybe this pandemic will start a movement I mean there must be thousands of people in big cities who haven't actually ever breathe clean air before who haven't been able to look up at the night sky and see stars twinkling at least very seldom but they won't want to go back to the old polluted things Jane just one last question what is your next adventure well my next - thank you my next reality I mean you know I'm 86 now my next adventure will probably be when I donate because when when we die there's either nothing which will that were obviously won't be an adventure but I won't know or there's something and if there is something which I saw to believe then what an adventure to find out what that something is Jane thank you so much and thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me well thanks great talking to you they say hey Soph I hope you enjoyed the clip for more interesting conversations please hit subscribe you

Channel: Skavlan

Views: 553,248

Rating: 4.8298903 out of 5

Keywords: Skavlan, interview, talk show, Fredrik skavlan, talkshow, doctor, dr, jane, goodall, chimps, chimpanzees, sjimpanser, legend, corona, virus, covid-19, pandemic, animals, china, wuhan, wet, markets, illegal, problem, close, activist

Id: hStJvTv_Sh0

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020

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[u/GMBoy]

Watch this great interview.