Further to my rantings on anthropomorphism (yes, I know, it excites you too!), through a tortuous series of events too mundane to recount here, yesterday I had the privilege of participating in a fascinating live online session with Dr Jane Goodall – she who discovered that Chimpanzees can use tools, communicate on a reasonably sophisticated level, and feel emotions not unlike those of humans.

In short, I was schooled by the octogenarian zoologist, and rather enjoyed the experience as it occurred.

Goodall, you will recall, caused a hoo-hah in the ‘70s scientific world by rather turning the whole process of becoming a boffin on its head. She spent years in the wild, getting to know the chimpanzees of Gombe in Tanzania, formed her opinions based on this intensive observation, wrote a book about it, and then went to university (Cambridge no less) to get her doctorate. 

This unconventional route seems to have worked pretty well, in her case at least. She certainly shook things up among the established scientific world. And one of the things she did that really ruffled their feathers, was to give the chimps she was studying names, instead of numbering them to preserve scientific objectivity.

She also reported that the chimps displayed a range of emotions, which conventional wisdom of the time held they could not do as these emotions were the preserve of humans only. To ascribe them to animals was to anthropomorphise the animals – and we all know that’s a no-no. 

Except, of course, she’s right. Chimps and other primates do indeed feel emotions – and we now know that other mammals, like elephants, do too. Orcas have been seen mourning the death of a calf, and even a seven-week-old puppy can express joy and sorrow depending on whether they are in favour with their humans or not.

And Goodall’s thinking is pretty compelling: she says that treating animals as things that are ‘other’ than us – i.e. incapable of emotion – has enabled us to treat them with the cruelty and contempt that we do. And this is the basis of the unsustainable materialistic lifestyle that has led to the catastrophic loss of biodiversity the planet is experiencing thanks to good old you and me.

Goodall reckons it’s entirely possible to communicate with animals if you understand the animal and open your mind to it. Maybe that’s why we get on so well with dogs – they’re not dumb, but it’s easy to open your mind to them because their minds are generally so wonderfully simple.

Communication is the thing that does rather differentiate us from the beasts – humans’ ability to communicate complex ideas has enabled us to get together and assert our dominion over the animals and plants, ironically also enabling us to put the planet on its current calamitous course. But it could also enable us to co-operate on finding solutions for this situation – and she’s reassuringly optimistic on that front.

All in all, Goodall saw the refusal to anthropomorphise animals – or to at least empathise with them – as a symptom and probably a cause of homo sapiens’ long career of ecological destruction. By implication, it would have been better if we’d ranked ourselves alongside the beasts and lived a more sustainable life.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. A little reshuffling of the pieces on the board and it’s now my position that those nauseating Disney-style animals with their cutesy songs and dances and little human-style houses are not, in fact, animals at all, but representations of people. Middle-class people with primarily North American preoccupations – the kind of people who we now need to get together to arrest climate change.

You can rely on the kind of steely determination and clarity of vision of a Goodall to shift our perceptions – even our weirder ones. She’s a bit of a force of nature in that way.