Dr Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall is an English zoologist, primatologist and anthropologist. She is one of – if not the – world’s leading experts in Chimpanzees, as she has been studying them since the 1960s when first visited Tanzania to observe the great apes in the wild. In 1977, she co-founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which “promotes understanding and protection of great apes and their habitat,” and aims “to inspire individual action by young people of all ages to help animals, other people and to protect the world we all share.”
Goodall stopped eating meat and became a vegetarian in the late 1960’s. Despite being a vegetarian for decades, it took Goodall until the early 2000s to transition to a plant-based diet. In 2017, she published an article titled ‘Why I Went Plant-Based (And Why We Should All Eat Less Meat)’, but, in 2020, she said that she was virtually vegan. It seems like Goodall does her best to stick to a vegan diet but may at times – perhaps, in desperate times – resort to vegetarianism. In 2021, she published a plant-based cookbook called Eat Meat Less: Good for Animals, the Earth & All.
She told Climate One:
“I stopped eating meat because I learned about the intensive animal agriculture and these terrible factory farms, and the next time I looked at meat on my plate, I thought this symbolises fear, pain and death so I stopped eating it. But then I began to realise a lot more. As nations around the world become wealthier, they eat more and more meat. It becomes a status symbol. And, so what’s happening is these billions of animals in these awful conditions, they have to be fed. Rainforests are being cut down to provide the grain. Huge amounts of fossil fuels are burned getting the grain to the animals, the animals to the abattoir, the meat to the table. Huge amounts of water are being wasted to change vegetable protein to animal protein.”
