A Wildlife Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Victoria Moran reflects on the tremendous impact Jane Goodall has had on our culture, bridging the gaps between animal advocates of all stripes and encouraging people to view other creatures as more like themselves.

The Divine Dr. Goodall, Accolades from an Acolyte
From Victoria Moran, Main Street Vegan Academy, MainStreetVegan.com
October 2025

Images from Canva

Originally printed in the Main Street Vegan blog, MainStreetVegan.com.

When Jane Goodall came into my world in 1965, it was on television via the CBS special, Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. This was a year before she received her PhD in ethology (animal behavior) and when she was Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, hyphenated for her first husband. And Baroness was much cooler than a doctorate to me. I was 15, and she was everything: pretty, British, and most of all: she hung out with nonhuman primates in the wild. They…knew…her — and vice versa, these beings who are endlessly fascinating in their own right and who are also the bridge between humankind and the whole, vast kingdom of animals who don’t resemble us so much. But they could, maybe, if Miss Goodall could show humans the personhood of chimps, convince people that the other animals are persons, too.

Through the years, she seemed to show up everywhere — in her books (16 of them), in a Stevie Nicks song, “Jane,” on an episode of The Simpsons and, about 10 years ago, on lists of famous vegans. With all this, she was bringing folks together. Animal welfare people and animal rights people … Advocates of wildlife and advocates for farmed animals, companion animals, and animals in laboratories … Environmentalists and conservationists …. Now, animal rights proponents and conservationists are famously at odds on a host of issues, but Jane defied boundaries. We all loved her, so we could all claim her. “She’s with us,” echoed legions of people who felt they were doing the right thing for animals and the earth.

This didn’t mean she shied from speaking up to keep everybody placated. Hardly. One of her powerful quotations is

“Thousands of people who say they love animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs.”

But because she was with all of us, disparate groups were able to have a bit more openness, more willingness to converse, more willingness to listen.

Her most recent gift to us all came, I think, in the way she left us. I was reading her Wikipedia and it said “Goodall died of natural causes in Los Angeles on 1st October 2025, at the age of 91, while on a speaking tour in the United States.” I read that over 4 or 5 times. She died at 91 on a speaking tour. And 60 years after being in awe of the pretty Englishwoman who knew chimps, I was in awe all over again. My bucket list got a great big addition last week, overshadowing every other entry left on it: to die, at whatever age, on a speaking tour. Maybe for you it’s to die, at whatever age, while rescuing beagles from a laboratory. Or after tending to an ailing baby squirrel, or pleading the case of some animal or other to elected officials, or making a vegan dinner for someone who mistakenly thought before they ate it that it wouldn’t fill them up.

Godspeed, Dr. Jane-unhyphenated-Goodall. We’ll do all we can to carry on for you here.

Victoria Moran shared these thoughts at the Compassion Consortium for their special “Sacred Sendoff” memorial service for Dr. Goodall on October 4th. Victoria is the author of Main Street Vegan and Age Like a Yogi, director of Main Street Vegan Academy, host of the Main Street Vegan Podcast, and a 2024 inductee into the Vegan Hall of Fame.

Photo from MainStreetVegan.com

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: October 14, 2025
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