Decolonising animal behaviour fieldwork

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I'm speaking very much out of my comfort zone, but it's really nice to follow Victoria's talk earlier, and also Cynthia's in some ways. So I'm going to be presenting what's really kind of a case study of some of the broader issues that have been talked about today in science, and I guess our general practice. And that's in my field, which is primatology. So this is just a map of where you find monkeys and apes in the world. And actually, two-thirds of all the primates are found in just four countries, Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, and Madagascar. But when it comes to people predominantly doing the research in these countries and on these animals, they tend to come from the international community, in inverted commas, from this map here, from Terrible Maps, which is a really great Twitter account to follow. And you'll notice that all these primatologists or the international community typically do not have primates living where they are, such as Japan. So from the get-go, there's this problem of, you know, it has these echoes of colonization, that we are going out to these countries using their resources, for want of a better word, to drive our industry. But historically, at least when it comes to diversity, primatology has some good stories to tell. You know, some of the most famous names in primatology have been women. I'm sure you recognize Jane Goodall. In the middle, there's Dian Fossey, Brooke Oldacastle, who's done amazing work with orangutan conservation. And Alison Jolly at the bottom, who's done a lot of great work in Madagascar with lemurs. I just want to give you two examples of some of the work that these women have done that highlight some of the kind of colonialist issues that have been occurring historically in primatology. And the first is with Jane Goodall, obviously an amazing force for conservation, amazing researcher as well. And I want to talk about the issue of discovery. And this is kind of related to ideas of truth and local knowledge that's also been discussed already. So you probably know that she's credited with discovering tool use in chimpanzees. And when she wrote her books about this, it was very transformative of our ideas of what animals are, how we fit in in evolution. And there's a quote there from her book where she wrote, I well remember writing to Louis Leakey, who is her supervisor and sponsor. And I remember, too, receiving the now off-quoted telegram he sent in response to my letter. Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans. So kind of reflecting how seminal this discovery was seen. But we now know, through some historical work that people have done, that there's a really nice example that's describing how Sierra Leoneans were describing chimpanzee tool use to Portuguese colonists in the 17th century. And then another nice example is that in Liberia, I don't think it's currently on their currency, or on their postage, at least. But they had a tool using chimpanzee on their currency or on their literature. So they well recognized that these animals had these kind of complex behaviors well before Jane Goodall did. So this is kind of an innocuous example of discovery only being possible by the international community. Kind of a more severe example is Dian Fossey, who some of you might have seen the film Gorillas in the Mist, where she was portrayed by Sigourney Weaver. Dian Fossey did amazing things for gorilla conservation and highlighting their plights. But she also did some really terrible things where she was working. If they caught poachers, she would instruct them to be whipped in front of the local villages in order to deter the behavior. And it's only recently, now that people are trying to address things like decolonization, that we're learning more about some of these dark sides of the dark romance of Dian Fossey, as the book puts it there. If you want to read more about that, you can on that link there from the slide. So these are historical examples. But I'm a primatologist. I go out into the field. And I'm active doing this. This is me looking at some chimpanzees up in the canopy, waiting for them to poo so I can collect their poo. But that's another story. And I just want to talk about some of the field sites that I've worked in quite recently, some of the really good things that I think they're doing, and just kind of open up the question of what kind of role do field sites have in kind of a decolonized science. So the field sites are the Thai Chimpanzee Project in Cote d'Ivoire, the Bodongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda, and then the Afren National Park up in Morocco. So the Bodongo Field Station in Uganda, Uganda's got really good infrastructure. And the field station is near a very popular safari location. As a consequence, it's got really good accessibility. And that means that jobs within the project are really desirable locally from the local villagers, but also generally around the country. It also means that it's really easy to get to and from things like universities and colleges. And the project has been really good at encouraging research assistants and staff to go further in their education when it comes to things like biology and veterinary practices. And many of the senior staff working in this project are Ugandan. And it's run, the camp manager and everything, it's all run by Ugandan people, which is not very typical for other private field sites. And it's also a popular ecotourism location, so there's lots of varied employment opportunities. The Thai National Project, sorry, the Thai Chimpanzee Project has a different problem. It's an extremely rural field site. It's stuck out in the middle of, it's about 10 hours away from any major city. So they employ people from local villages, and the jobs are very desirable locally. And the project helps with things like vaccinations and stuff like that. But because it's so remote, and these health projects help make the project popular locally, it helps them to value things like the chimpanzees. They don't want to go out and poach the chimpanzees because then the project won't probably stay there, and therefore they'll lose some of these benefits of them being there. But it's a really remote location, which means that the people from the cities in Cote d'Ivoire, it's not a very desirable place to go and work, typically. So as a consequence, this project really relies on overseas researchers going in there to manage it and maintain it and keep it going. And then the projects, the field site that where I'm doing my work now is a collaboration with Liz Campbell, who's pictured on the top left hand slide there, in Morocco. So Morocco's got excellent accessibility and infrastructure. And Liz has been really proactive in trying to get the Moroccan people engaged and interested in the primate conservation, but also wolf conservation, things like this. And she's even managed to get a Moroccan student a fellowship to do a PhD at the University of Oxford, which I think is great. But generally, there's a low local interest in conservation, despite that these animals could be useful for ecotourism purposes. So a big part of the work to date in that field site has been related to education and outreach with local communities. So even though these field sites, I think, are doing really great things, there is this kind of danger of a colonial approach of foreigners going in, running the industry in the countries with these resources. That said, these field sites take a lot of money. They take a lot of time to keep running. And these are resources that are quite hard for us to get from even the UK, but even harder to try and encourage the governments to put money into running them. So these resources are not often allocated to these projects. So because, like I said, I'm not very much out of my comfort zone presenting on this general topic, I just want to put it out as a question, as what role, if any, can primate or general biology field sites and conservation field sites have in a properly decolonized scientific community? What should their activity be? It's an open question. And like I said, I'm an active researcher. I want to do the best going forward. How much time have I got left? A minute and a half. OK, so there was this very nice paper, I should have put the full citation on there, about decolonizing ecology in general. And just to run through it very quickly, they talk about decolonizing your mind. So it's recognizing these issues in the first place. And then two aspects of recognizing local knowledge and decolonizing the expertise, so getting as many different people involved in the research as possible. Practicing ethical ecology, so again, by having an inclusive team. And then very importantly, decolonizing access. So there is sometimes, in some field sites, almost an exclusion of local assistants and researchers. And certainly, potentially an exclusion of access to the data that are generated in these field sites. OK, well, that's it. I'm done. Thank you very much.