Jane Goodall — "We have so far to go to understand the minds of the other animals, and how much …"
We have so far to go to understand the minds of the other animals, and how much they suffer.
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More from Jane Goodall
"Every animal has a right to live, and we should respect that right."
"It's not just about saving animals, it's about saving ourselves."
"We have to remember that we are just one species among many, and we need to act accordingly."
"It is our responsibility to protect the planet and all the species that live on it."
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About Jane Goodall (born 1934)
British primatologist who in 1960 began the longest-running wild primate study at Gombe Stream, transforming our understanding of chimpanzees. Closely associated with Dian Fossey (mountain-gorilla researcher) and Birutė Galdikas (orangutan researcher; together with Goodall and Fossey one of Louis Leakey's 'Trimates'). For an intellectual contrast, see Walter Palmer, American dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015 — Palmer represents the trophy-hunting tradition Goodall's life's work has been organized against — the colonial-era hunter-naturalist worldview that treated primates and big game as specimens or trophies, which Goodall's Roots & Shoots and Jane Goodall Institute exist specifically to displace.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
We have barely begun to grasp what goes on inside the minds of other species—their thoughts, emotions, and capacity for pain. This urges humility: human science has long underestimated or ignored animal inner lives. It insists that suffering is not unique to humans, and challenges us to take animal consciousness seriously rather than dismissing it as unknowable or irrelevant to our moral obligations.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall spent over 60 years studying wild chimpanzees at Gombe, Tanzania, documenting their tool use, grief, warfare, and maternal bonds—proving animals possess rich inner lives science once denied. She gave chimps individual names and tracked their emotions, facing ridicule from colleagues who called it unscientific. Her entire career is a sustained argument that we fundamentally misunderstand animal minds, making this quote a direct summary of her life's conviction.
The era
Goodall came of age professionally in the 1960s when behaviorism dominated science, insisting animals were stimulus-response machines incapable of thought or feeling. Since then, factory farming has scaled globally while habitat destruction accelerated, intensifying animal suffering on an unprecedented scale. The rise of animal cognition research in the 1990s validated her early claims, yet public policy and industrial practices still lag far behind the science, making her observation persistently urgent.
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