“When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.”
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Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.
I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.
When I began in 1960, individuality wasn't an accepted thing to look for it was about species-specific behaviour. But animal behaviour is not hard science. There's room for intuition.
War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.
