Traveling the globe with Mr. H — a stuffed chimpanzee whose name stands for Hope — primatologist Jane Goodall never forgets those things in her life that have made an impact — things like cherished gifts or neighborhood dogs.

On July 14, Goodall marked the 50th anniversary of her pioneering chimpanzee research. While Goodall considers David Greybeard, a gray-chinned male chimpanzee who first accepted her during her field study in Gombe, Africa, as a breakthrough, it was a different creature — a dog named Rusty — who kept her on her path.

"I don't know what spoke to me," Goodall said in Santa Fe earlier this year about animals while visiting the Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society. "I've been told that even before I could walk, I was watching animals. It was just in me. I don't know what it was, but it was always important to me."

Goodall, who is celebrating her research milestone by traveling in Africa this month — including Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, the site of her groundbreaking 1960 study — reflected on her interest in Africa and animals while in Santa Fe in April. Her love of Tarzan books as a child left her with a deep desire to visit Africa, but it was her connection to Rusty that led her to discover how closely animals are linked to humans.

In fact, if Rusty hadn't died, Goodall said, she probably would never have gone to Africa.

"I wouldn't have left him," she said. "We moved to London and had to leave him, but I went back to see him every weekend. But then he died, and I was drawn to Africa."

Goodall, 76, acknowledges now that the Tarzan books were "bloodthirsty," but like many stories of the time, she just accepted them. She said admired those who could communicate with animals, like the characters in another popular children's series, Dr. Doolittle.

"I was jealous," she said. "I wanted to learn an animal language. Actually, I pretended I could understand them and all my friends believed me. To be Tarzan, out in the jungle with all those animals."

Her dream at 11 to travel to Africa came closer to reality when a childhood friend invited her to Kenya. Goodall, by then, had gone to secretarial school because her family couldn't afford university tuition.

But she couldn't save enough money for the trip while working in London, so she went back to her hometown to work as a waitress. "We didn't have any money," she said. "We couldn't even afford a bicycle."

After six months, Goodall saved enough for the fare and traveled to Kenya. While there, she met Louis Leakey, an archaeologist and naturalist whose work is known for his study on human evolutionary development. He offered Goodall a secretarial job.

"He took me out on an expedition on the Serengeti Plains, at a time that it was absolutely untouched, with no roads," Goodall said. "That's when he decided I was the person he had been looking for, because I didn't care about hair-dressing, or about parties or clothes."

Goodall described Leakey as a mentor who was "bigger than life." He was irritating to his peers, she said, because he didn't follow protocol with newly discovered fossils. Instead of inviting scientists into the field for examination and deliberation, Leakey collaborated with trusted friends and then held a news conference.

"Everybody was mad at him, in particular because he was always right," she said. "It was a new species or a new genus or whatever."

Goodall adopted Leakey's self-reliance in the field, and later, when she went back to school to get her doctorate. There was no time to get a bachelor's degree, Goodall said, so she plunged into a doctorate program, encountering resentment from her peers. She is one of only nine people to receive a doctorate from Cambridge University without first earning a bachelor's degree.

"I'd come in the back door," she said. "It was shocking for me to be told that I'd done everything wrong — that I shouldn't have given the chimps names, I should have given them numbers; and that I couldn't talk about personality, mind or feeling. And it was because of Rusty that I knew that was wrong."

Leakey had set out, through field studies by Goodall and others, to determine human evolutionary behavior. While fossils can be reconstructed to indicate much about Leakey's discoveries —what they ate, if they walked upright, and even whether they hunted based on stone tools he found — there were few clues about behavior.

"He reckoned that if we had a common ancestor x-millennia ago, which he believed, and which I believed," she said, "then if you found behavior that was the same or similar in chimpanzees today — the closest to us — then quite possibly that shared behavior was derived from the common ancestor and we brought it with us on the long path of human evolution, and then that would help him to understand the behavior of Stone Age man. It was very forward thinking."

The first sighting of Gombe chimps was disappointing, Goodall said. She had been initially observing monkeys on an island on Lake Victoria, because a fishing dispute had made it unsafe for her to start her field studies in that part of Africa.

"I had been watching these dear little vervet monkeys," she said. "They had gotten so used to me. They were so charming, and I was getting to know them, then off I go to Gombe, and here were these black things up in a tree. They took one look at me, and then they were gone, and it's thick jungle."

Eventually, however, Goodall succeeded in breaking the ice with the chimpanzees, although she admits they aren't her favorite creatures — something of a surprise to most people. She much prefers dogs.

"Chimpanzees are too much like humans to be my favorite," she said.

The understanding of animals has changed since Goodall first started observing the Gombe chimpanzees. Now most major universities offer studies on animal mind, personality and emotions.

"Chimps have been like ambassadors," she said. "They force you to understand that there's not a sharp line in dividing us from all the other animals. It's a blurry line; there are differences, but there are not differences of kind, but differences of degree."

The expression of the intellect is the greatest difference, Goodall noted, which she attributes to the development of language. Humans, unlike animals, can discuss ideas, teach about things that aren't there and plan for the distant future.

In spite of changes in human attitude toward animals, there remains a huge pocket of resistance. "That comes from especially scientists that are doing invasive research," Goodall said. "They don't want to believe that animals have feelings and emotions. And from the hunters, the trappers and those who do intensive farming. It's much more convenient not to think these animals have feelings.

A longtime vegetarian, Goodall gave up eating animal protein when she read Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation. After reading the book, "the next time I saw meat, I thought, 'This is symbolic of fear, pain and death. I don't want to eat fear, pain and death. What does it do to me to eat that?' "

While supportive of those who push for animal rights, Goodall said she prefers to fight for human responsibility toward animals as opposed to animal rights.

"We've signed a bill for human rights, and human rights are abused and broken around the world every day," she said. Animal rights are "not a bad thing, but I'm pushing to get the people's hearts involved. Laws don't change people's hearts."

Battle brews over research chimpanzees

Many residents, including New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, are rallying to stop the federal government’s decision to send 200 former research chimpanzees housed at Holloman Air Force Base in Southern New Mexico from being transferred to a Texas facility where they could be subject to more invasive research.

The Jane Goodall Institute, along with its Santa Fe regional office, is working with the Humane Society of the U.S. to get members of Congress involved in addressing concerns to the National Institutes of Health, according to a press release. The groups are pushing for a resolution that meets the best interest of the chimpanzees.

Follow updates on this issue through the Animal Protection of New Mexico website at apnm.org/campaigns/chimps/index.php