Pets, Workers, and Patients

In the Last Week Tonight interview, in response to a question from Oliver about whether it is chimpanzees' similarity to humans that makes them “such great pets,” Goodall begins to say that they make the “worst possible” pets, but then breaks off in mid-sentence to assert that they should not be seen as pets at all. Oliver's question is again facetious but well-posed, providing an opportunity for Goodall to address a potential misconception arising from accounts of her personal contact with chimpanzees at her research site in Gombe Stream, Tanzania, and from her decision to give them personal names: namely, that she had treated the chimpanzees as pets. By objecting that chimpanzees should not be considered pets under any circumstances, Goodall clarifies the significance of her naming practices. David Greybeard, Goliath, Flo, Fifi and the other chimpanzees she named were proper subjects for naming, she implies, in virtue of their status as nonhuman persons.

That such a clarification might be necessary should not be surprising in light of the long history of humans giving personal names to the individual animals with whom they have established enduring relationships of leisure, labor, and companionship (Hollander Reference Hollander1995, 461). When Homer's Odysseus returns home in disguise after a long absence, for example, it is the aged but still faithful dog Argos who is the first one to recognize him (Rose Reference Rose1979). In the daily lives of the middle-class North Americans who are the main audience for Last Week Tonight, pets are the only animals who commonly receive personal names. Although these animals are often closely integrated into the structure of the family, such integration does not require human pet-keepers to recognize the rights or personhood of the animal. On the contrary, pet-keeping is typically based on a clear moral hierarchy that places humans above nonhuman animals, who are expected to be treated humanely but are also considered to be living property that can be discarded or destroyed at will (Thomas Reference Thomas1983: 110–114; Tuan Reference Tuan1984; Ritvo Reference Ritvo1987, 82–124; Kete Reference Kete1995; Grier Reference Grier2006).

The relationship of scientists to the animals they study has conventionally been considered to be distinct from, and even diametrically opposed to, such relationships of pet-keeping (see, e.g., Birke et al. Reference Birke, Arnold and Mike2007), even while sharing with them a view of animals as property. This is true even for animal behavior research that does not involve vivisection or killing of animals. Such behavioral research emerged in something like its modern form in the late nineteenth century, when biologists in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States attempted to place comparative studies of human and nonhuman minds on a rigorous empirical foundation (Stam and Kalmanovitch Reference Stam and Kalmanovitch1998; Mitman and Burkhardt Reference Mitman, Burkhardt, Benson, Rainger and Maienschein1991; Lutts Reference Lutts2001; Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005). For most of the period of the field's existence, ethologists and animal-behavior researchers considered the individual animals they studied to be essentially interchangeable representatives of the species as an ideal type. Some animals, particularly those in captivity who could be easily identified over an extended period of time, were given names. To name an individual animal was to acknowledge the affective and social bonds that tied one to him or her and perhaps to even to acknowledge a limited responsibility of care, but such acknowledgments were compartmentalized from the study of the animal as a biological object or its use as a tool for researching basic biological processes.

When captive animals whose identity could be easily ascertained were the objects of long-term physiological or behavioral research, naming seems to have been more the rule than the exception. The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and the members of his laboratory, for example, gave their first highly effective “dog-technology” the name Druzhok (Todes Reference Todes2001, 124). Druzhok's unusual experimental tractability made him an essential component of a series of experiments in the mid-1890s on the behavioral conditioning of physiological processes. In addition to being a convenient way to identify the individual who was being experimented on, the naming of dogs in the lab also reflected the social significance of pet and working dogs in Russian culture. As Pavlov explained in 1893, the dog was the ideal experimental subject because of its compliance, docility, and obedience; it was “almost a participant in the experiments conducted upon it” (ibid., 123). Objects and tools of research could remain nameless, but participants who were also pets deserved to be named.

Like most other research animals of the time, Druzhok's individual characteristics and identity were seen as irrelevant to the generalizability of Pavlov's research, even as they made it possible. He was recognized by name not because he was a nonhuman person with sentience and rights, but because he was an unusually good tool for examining a process considered to be universal across dogs and other species, and because it was and remains common to name dogs as pets and working animals. Thus individuality was simultaneously recognized and effaced. As Otniel Dror has argued, physiologists who studied live animals in the early twentieth-century United States recognized variability in temperament and sensitivity among individual animals in order to select the most “good-natured” and “tranquil” animals for research (Dror Reference Dror1999, 222). At the same time, they attempted to control the experimental situation in such a way as to minimize extraneous and potentially disruptive emotional reactions. Individuality was a condition for research rather than its object.

Personal names were thus not essential to scientists' understanding of the animals they studied and did not appear in their scientific publications, even when they were commonly used in the laboratory. The American biologist Lawrence C. Cole, for example, attempted to make the raccoon into a standard organism for animal behavior research in the early twentieth century. Michael Pettit notes that although the raccoons in Cole's lab were “officially numbered in the experimental reports, these same documents betray that they were called names such as Jack, Jim, Tom and Dolly” (Pettit Reference Pettit2010, 409). Similarly, the animals in a colony of hemophiliac dogs established in North Carolina in the 1940s were given personal names corresponding to their roles as veterinary patients with individualized needs, even as they were assumed to be essentially anonymous and interchangeable as model organisms for human hemophilia (Pemberton Reference Pemberton, Schrepfer and Scranton2004). These names did not appear in publication; they were for use solely within the boundaries of the research laboratory.

Under pressure from anti-vivisectionists, early twentieth-century animal researchers increasingly avoided rhetoric implying that the animals they studied could be compared to pets, whose trust in their human caretakers demanded reciprocation (Lederer Reference Lederer1992). The taboo against mentioning animal names in scientific publications was sometimes loosened in publications for popular audiences. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz, for example, gave some of the animals he studied personal names: Tschock for his tamed jackdaw, for example, or Martin and Martina for a pair of geese (Munz Reference Munz2011). He did not hesitate to use those names in his many popular writings and had no apparent anxiety about being accused of anthropomorphism (e.g., Lorenz Reference Lorenz1964). If anything, Lorenz was guilty of the opposite error, theriomorphism, inasmuch as he tended to see humans through the lens of his animal research (Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005, 250). In accordance with the importance of pet-keeping as a model for the naming of research animals, most of Lorenz's research focused on quasi-domesticated animals in and around his home (Kohler Reference Kohler2011). Despite his use of personal names, he focused on species-typical behaviors and regarded individual differences as of little scientific importance. He seems to have believed, as Richard Burkhardt has argued, that “all healthy individuals of a wild, free-living species are essentially identical” (Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005, 141; see also Crist Reference Crist2000, 88–122; Mitman Reference Mitman, Daston and Mitman2005, 178). In this he was not notably different from other ethologists and animal psychologists of the time.

Thus, even when it was the researchers themselves who had given the animals names, individual identity and personal names remained insignificant in terms of research aims well into the mid-twentieth century. Since such names almost never appeared in the published literature, with the exception of some popular texts, it is difficult to say precisely how widespread such naming practices were. In most cases where scholars have been able to examine laboratory notes, however, and where animals who could be easily identified or distinguished from each other were being studied over extended periods of time, the use of personal names seems to have been common. Generally associated with the animals' social roles as pets, workers, or patients rather than with their epistemic role as objects of scientific inquiry, such naming practices provoked few anxieties about ethics or objectivity. In light of this history, it is not the practice of naming research animals that was unusual in Goodall's work, but rather the claim that one could and should name them without making them into pets, workers, patients, or other subordinate roles within a human-dominated social order.

Objects of Trade and Display

Oliver's interview with Goodall is preceded by a series of film clips depicting Goodall's interactions with the chimpanzees of Gombe in the 1960s, which are accompanied by a voice-over explaining several of her most striking scientific findings, including the discovery of chimpanzee tool-making, hunting, and warfare. These clips appear to be extracts from longer films and television specials produced by the National Geographic Society, which began funding Goodall's research in 1961 and first featured her work in the 1965 special Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees (Peterson Reference Peterson2006, 213–214; see also Haraway Reference Haraway1989, 133–185; Chris Reference Chris2006, 62–66). In the context of these films, the personal names given to chimpanzees such as David Greybeard, Flo, and Fifi served as unique identifiers for characters who played key narrative roles in a story of redemptive contact with nature. These animal characters were in turn an important part of National Geographic's marketing efforts. To name an animal was to enable him or her to circulate in new and potentially highly profitable ways. David Greybeard and Flo were not for sale, of course, but their images and personalities generated revenue for National Geographic and later helped Goodall raise funds for chimpanzee protection and other efforts. Film and television were the media through which such value could accumulate and circulate even as the animals themselves remained in place (cf. Shukin Reference Shukin2009).

As with the naming of research animals in virtue of their dual roles as pets, workers, or patients, animals could receive names not because they were being recognized as sentient nonhuman individuals for scientific purposes but rather because they were seen as objects of trade or display, whose value could circulate and accumulate more easily with the help of a name. The creation of animal celebrities via film (and the selling of films via animal celebrities) is only one of the latest episodes in the long history of using personal names as tools for establishing animals' value. The development of studbooks for the breeding of horses and other animals in Britain since the late eighteenth century, for example, depended on the use of personal names, which made it possible to establish prestigious genealogies modeled on aristocratic practice (Ritvo Reference Ritvo1987, Reference Ritvo and Ritvo2010; Derry Reference Derry2003). To name an animal as a unique individual was to make it possible to assign him or her (as well as his or her progeny) an elevated value within a market economy. As in the case of film, the presence of the body of the named animal was not always necessary for such value to accumulate. Reproductive potential, for instance, in the form of stud services or progeny, acquired value from its association with named individuals whose own value was corroborated by detailed genealogies (Ritvo Reference Ritvo and Ritvo2010).

In other cases, such as for the purpose of display and performance in museums, circuses, menageries, marine parks, and zoological gardens, the physical presence of the named individual was essential to the accumulation of value. A celebrity animal such as the elephant Jumbo, who was displayed in London's Regent's Park until he was purchased by the American circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum in 1882 (Ritvo Reference Ritvo1987, 232; see also Nance Reference Nance2013), or the celebrity pandas loaned from the Chinese government to zoos around the world since the 1970s (Schaller Reference Schaller1993; Miller Reference Miller2013, 193–230), could attract crowds not only because they were enormous, exotic, or endangered but also because they had been given names that allowed them to be developed as distinctive characters in the mass media. Behind the scenes, such animals might also be referred to by numbers, codes, or alternative names, a doubling that reflected the zoo's dual roles of preservation and display (Braverman Reference Braverman2013, 92–110). In public, their names provided a powerful marketing tool. That the association between the individual and the name was a matter of marketing and storytelling more than anything else is evident by the fact that, as in the case of SeaWorld's killer whale Shamu, the same name could be used for all of the different individuals who played a particular narrative role (Davis Reference Davis1997).

For animal behavior researchers, the animals displayed in such institutions provided opportunities to study exotic animals that might not otherwise be easily accessible as living specimens. Miss Congo, a mountain gorilla studied by the American primatologist Robert M. Yerkes in the late 1920s, is one example (Montgomery Reference Montgomery2009). She was originally imported to New York by hunter, collector, and filmmaker Ben Burbridge, who gave her to the Ringling and Barnum and Bailey Circus in Florida after she became unmanageable. Miss Congo acquired a public identity via her name and the conditions of her display; this made Yerkes' research possible, but it was extraneous to his scientific goals. Yerkes had little interest in Miss Congo's individuality or personality or in tracing her social relationships to others of her species—none of whom were, in any case, on hand. She was, rather, a living specimen who stood in for all gorillas. Her name was a marker of celebrity and an aid to marketing, but it indicated nothing about how she was being approached as an object of science.

The contrast with another gorilla who was intensively studied and given a personal name later in the twentieth century is instructive. Born in captivity at the San Francisco Zoo in 1971, Koko was trained by Francine Patterson to communicate using hand signs based on American Sign Language and to respond to a number of spoken English words (Patterson and Linden Reference Patterson and Linden1981). Unlike Miss Congo, whom Yerkes approached as a generic specimen of the species, Koko was approached as an individual capable of learning and changing through experience. Her personal name and individual identity thus took on a scientific significance quite different from Miss Congo's. The contrast between the two cases suggests how fluid the significance of naming can be as a signifier of human-animal relations. Both gorillas were named, but Miss Congo's name was irrelevant to science because she stood as a representative of the gorilla as an ideal type, whereas Koko's name was scientifically relevant because it was her particular abilities and experiences that made her worthy of study. It was only in the latter case, where the name's significance as a marker of social relation, market value, and the scientific significance of individuality became blurred, that troubling questions about anthropomorphism and objectivity arose.

To give a research animal a name is thus not necessarily to make a claim about the animal's sentience, personhood, rights, or resemblance to humans. It can simply be to enhance its value – and here “it” is really the proper pronoun – in a market where the individual's particular traits are deemed to be important, whether for the purposes of reproducing particular forms of genetic capital, attracting crowds to sites of amusement, disseminating compelling narratives through the mass media, or raising funds for animal welfare and wildlife conservation. Just as an animal can be individually named in virtue of his or her role as a pet, worker, or patient but also simultaneously coded or numbered in virtue of his or her role as a standardized research tool (Clause Reference Clause1993; Rader Reference Rader2004), so can an animal be named for the purpose of accumulating value in public while remaining effectively nameless for the purposes of scientific research. To point out these alternative motivations for naming is not to question the sincerity of Goodall or other researchers who have discussed their practice of giving animals personal names in public in terms of their recognition of the nonhuman personhood of their research subjects, but rather to show how multifaceted the act of naming can be.

Techniques of Identification and Individuation

One of the assumptions undergirding the brief discussion of Goodall's naming practices in her interview with Oliver is that there are only two choices when it comes to designating individual chimpanzees: either they can be given personal names (perhaps in addition to numbers or alphanumerical codes), as Goodall insisted on doing, or they can be given nothing but numbers or codes, as some other scientists urged her to do for the sake of objectivity. The possibility that the chimpanzees could be left without any names or numbers at all goes unmentioned. In the history of behavioral research, however, there have been many situations in which animals have not been given unique labels associated with durable identities over time. Individuation has its own history, and techniques of individuation have often provided the necessary precondition to the possibility of giving animals names or numbers, let alone debating which of the two is more effective or objective. The ethical and epistemological questions raised by naming thus have important technical prerequisites.

Most of the examples of personal naming given above concern animals kept in captivity, whether in the lab, zoo, or home. For research on animal behavior in the field, naming has been much less common. This is in part because wild animals encountered at field sites have neither played the dual roles as pets, workers, or patients that have motivated the naming of many captive research animals nor served as a narrative locus for the accumulation of value. It is also because of significant practical challenges in attributing durable identities to non-captive animals, as well as a lack of interest in individuality among animal behavior researchers until recently. As with captive-based research, field research on animal behavior has often taken the animals observed as representatives of ideal types or categories, rather than as individuals with distinctive personalities, experiences, and social positions. As a result it has often been neither possible nor desirable to track the fate of an individual animal in the field over an extended period of time.

The lack of interest in and ability to identify individuals is particularly striking in the case of early-twentieth-century ornithology, where British field naturalists led the transition from studies of morphology and distribution characteristic of the nineteenth century toward studies of behavior and ecology more typical of the twentieth century (Allen [Reference Allen1976] Reference Allen1994; Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005). Amateur or quasi-professional researchers such as Edmund Selous and H. Eliot Howard developed empirically grounded theories about the causes and patterns of animal behavior that could be quite sophisticated and attentive to social interactions among individual animals, as in Howard's theory of territoriality (Howard [1920] Reference Howard1964; see also Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005, 94). Nonetheless, they rarely used names to identify the animals they studied, particularly outside of situations where animals could be closely controlled and repeatedly observed. Because their field studies of animal behavior aimed to paint species-typical portraits from isolated observations of particular interactions or behaviors, it generally mattered little which particular animal was doing the behaving.

With the limited exception of the behavior of animals that were bound to a nest or mating territory for a season, the difficulty of persistently identifying particular individuals in the field over multiple days, let alone over months or years, led to a focus on single moments of behavior or on punctuate social interactions. The American proto-ethologist Wallace Craig, for example, was interested in individual differences among animals and conducted influential research on the social behaviors of captive pigeons, each of whom he could identify (e.g., Craig Reference Craig1908; see Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005, 39–42). When he worked with non-captive animals in the field, however, as in his study of variations in the “twilight song” of the pewee (Craig Reference Craig1933), he was forced to study variations among songs rather than variations among individuals. That is, the song became the basic unit of analysis, divorced from any concept of the animal as an individual with a durable identity and social relations.

In any case, field studies of behavior were rare during this period (Radick Reference Radick2008; Mitman and Burkhardt Reference Montgomery1991; Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005). This is not because biologists and naturalists never went into the field, but because those who did were still primarily interested in morphology, evolution, and biogeography – that is, in the form of animals, their phylogenetic relationships to each other, and their distribution across the landscape (Allen [Reference Allen1976] Reference Allen1994; Browne Reference Browne1983; Farber Reference Farber2000; Kohler Reference Kohler2006; Nyhart Reference Nyhart1995, Reference Nyhart2009). These questions could be answered without identifying individuals as such, even if specimens brought back to the laboratory, museum, or zoological park were often given individual labels for the purposes of inventory management (see, e.g., Everest Reference Everest, Samuel and Alberti2011). For such research, it was neither necessary nor in most cases possible to identify individual animals qua individuals in the field, let alone to give them names, numbers, or other individuating labels.

This began to change with the generation of researchers that followed Selous and Howard, who developed an array of techniques of identification and individuation that made it possible to reliably recognize particular animals in the field over months or years for purposes of both population ecology and behavioral research. No one at the time seems to have believed that individual animals – aside from the occasional individual with highly distinctive features or habits such as an unusual gait, a broken horn, or a visible scar – could be recognized by the unaided human eye under field conditions. The focus was instead on the development of artificial marking techniques, including the use of tags, collars, rings, bands, tattoos, brands, dyes, and various forms of mutilation, such as toe-clipping and ear-notching (see Silvy et al. Reference Silvy, Lopez, Peterson and Silvy2012 for a present-day survey).

One of the most notable successes resulting from these efforts was the use of bird-banding or ringing to study migration and behavior (Barrow Reference Barrow1998; Wilson Reference Wilson2010; De Bont Reference De Bont2015, 147–174; for similar techniques used to study fish, see Jansen Reference Jansen2002). As with naming, the practice of marking animals through mutilation or tagging was not original to scientific research. Some of the details of the methods were new, but various kinds of marks had long been used to indicate possession over livestock and other domestic animals. Cattle branding, the marking of swans' bills, or the placing of collars on cats and dogs all served to assign the animal to a particular human owner or owners (see MacGregor Reference MacGregor2012). In the scientific context, in contrast, identification was used to distinguish among different individuals so that their life histories and social relations could be traced over time.

One of the scientists who contributed to the development of such techniques of individuation and identification for the purpose of field research on animal behavior was the American ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice (Mitman and Burkhardt Reference Mitman, Burkhardt, Benson, Rainger and Maienschein1991; Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005). By attaching colored celluloid bands to the legs of live-trapped birds, particularly song sparrows, Nice was able to identify them in the field without recapturing them (Nice Reference Nice1934 and Reference Nice1979; Barrow Reference Barrow1998; Wilson Reference Wilson2010). The colored bands enabled studies of behaviors such as territoriality and mating with a kind of rigor that Howard or Selous had never been able to attain. After Selous's death in 1934, Nice praised his genius for observation and devotion to his work but also criticized him for failing to use bands to individually identify animals, with which “he could have been sure of many things that, as it was, remained in the realm of conjectural” (Nice Reference Nice1935, 95; see Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005, 92). Among these things was the claim that certain birds mated for life – a clear example of a behavioral phenomenon that required researchers to identify individuals over extended periods of time.

While techniques that made it possible to discriminate among individuals at a distance were essential to this kind of long-term behavioral research, they had little utility until they were coupled to new methods of record-keeping. In Nice's case, each marked bird was given a name, an alphanumeric code, or both. Beginning with two banded pairs of song sparrows, Nice eventually expanded to dozens of differentiable birds, the behaviors of each of whom could be recorded and assembled into individual life histories, from which broader conclusions about the species could be drawn (Nice Reference Nice1939). In her field notes, Nice typically gave the birds she studied names drawn from myth, such as Siegmund, Sieglinde, Xantippe, Vega, Arcturus, and Jupiter, or number-like names, such as Una, Uno, and Quarta. Along with these names, most of her birds also received alphanumeric codes, such as 4M, 5M, 50M, or 221M (Nice Reference Nice1979, 142). The males were numbered sequentially and females were named after each of the males with whom they had mated, in such a way that the females’ breeding history could be reconstructed from their full “field number” alone (Nice Reference Nice1930, 179–180).

The development of tags and recording systems as well as the training and disciplining of the researcher's vision together comprised a kind of “perceptual machinery” of ecological fieldwork (Roth and Bowen Reference Roth and Bowen1999; see also Law and Lynch Reference Law and Lynch1988), which made it possible for animals to be treated as individuals for scientific purposes. This machinery was developed and applied in a variety of scientific contexts. Around the same time that Nice was color-banding her song sparrows, for example, the Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch was gluing colored dots onto the backs of the bees he was studying in order to draw connections between their foraging paths and the “waggle dance” they performed to communicate with other bees (Munz Reference Munz2005, 543–44). For larger animals, collars, tags, and other artificial marks of various kinds were increasingly used to study a wide variety of animals in the field. These technical developments can be seen as one consequence of the efforts of ecologists and ethologists in the mid-twentieth-century to bring laboratory-like rigor into studies of nature in the field, but they also drew directly on and helped to refine long-standing traditions within field biology and natural history (Kohler Reference Kohler2002 and Reference Kohler2006; Montgomery Reference Montgomery2005; Rees Reference Rees2009, 25–46; De Bont Reference De Bont2015).

In hindsight, what is most striking about the use of personal names by Nice and others of her generation is the absence of both the anxiety and the enthusiasm with which the practice would be approached by Goodall's generation. In Nice's case, for instance, there is no evidence of concern that the use of numbers and names led to the kind of differential ethical sensitization or risk of anthropomorphism that would be suggested by later commentators. This nonchalant approach to naming coincided with and indeed can be seen as part of a burst of technical creativity in devising new means for rendering individual animals identifiable for the purposes of behavioral research. Only once such techniques of identification and individuation were available did it become possible to assign durable labels, whether numbers or names. These numbers and names were seen primarily as research tools rather than as social or ethical claims. One reason was that the focus of research remained on species-typical behaviors rather than on individual differences, let alone questions of personhood, sentience, or rights. As a result, concerns that naming would encourage anthropomorphism and undermine objectivity were subdued or entirely absent.

Naming as a Social and Ethical Claim

Intentionally or not, Goodall's practice of giving personal names to the chimpanzees she encountered at Gombe drew on all of the practices described above. To name a chimpanzee David Greybeard or Flo was to acknowledge a social relationship that, like Pavlov's relationship to Druzhok, made a particular kind of scientific investigation possible but was not itself necessarily the focus of research. It was also to figure the chimpanzee as a character in a compelling narrative that would help value to accrue both to the National Geographic Society and to Goodall as an international celebrity, just as the naming of individual animals in zoos or circuses helps to attract ticket-buying crowds. And it was a technique of identification and individuation that, like Nice's names and alphanumeric codes, facilitated the practice of fieldwork. In all of these ways, Goodall's methods were continuous with those of other animal behavior researchers who preceded her.

This can be seen clearly in her use of food provisioning to generate opportunities to closely observe free-living chimpanzees, particularly in the first few years of her fieldwork at Gombe. By doing so, Goodall established a relationship to her research subjects that was somewhere between the study of captive animals, who had often been given personal names by researchers, and the study of animals in the field, who were named more rarely. As Amanda Rees has noted, one of the distinctive features of postwar primatology – first introduced by Japanese primatologists in the 1950s and then extended to North America and Europe in the 1960s – was the increasing use of habituation and provisioning, which abandoned the goal of preserving animal societies in their pristine natural state by maintaining the researchers’ anonymity and distance (Rees Reference Rees2007; see also Haraway Reference Haraway1989).

This is not to suggest that Goodall was in any way domesticating the wild animals she studied (cf. Woodward Reference Woodward, Freeman, Leane and Watt2011, 54; Whitney Reference Whitney2014). By providing food at a central location close to her residence in the field, however, she was moving a few steps closer to the kinds of relationships and contexts in which personal naming had been common. Thus her vehement rejection of the idea that chimpanzees make “great pets” elides the complexity of her relationship to them, which was neither the “farmer” model of ethological research on tamed, captive animals pursued by Lorenz nor the “hunter” model of observation of wild animals pursued by another mid-twentieth-century founder of ethology, Niko Tinbergen (Kruuk Reference Kruuk2003; Burkhardt Reference Burkhardt2005, 194). In the borderlands between Lorenz-esque research on captive, quasi-domesticated animals and Tinbergen-esque research on wild, free-living animals, Goodall's use of naming looks more like an extension of prior practices than a radical innovation.

Similarly, Goodall's naming practices appear less radical than they might at first glance when placed in the context of the long history of naming animals in order to facilitate the circulation and accumulation of value. Goodall's naming of David Greybeard and other chimpanzees helped generate value for the National Geographic Society and ultimately for herself and for the causes she espoused. Much of her early work at Gombe was funded and popularized by the National Geographic Society, which helped fashion the personal myth that Goodall would later deploy to great effect in her activism on behalf of chimpanzees in particular and animals and the environment in general.

In the use of naming to craft compelling stories that attracted audiences and donations, Goodall was hardly unique, even if she was among the earliest and most prominent. Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Cynthia Moss, for example, later carried out studies of elephants using similar techniques of habituation and individual identification over extended periods of time (Mitman Reference Mitman, Daston and Mitman2005), and they both named their animals and circulated those names in the media. Even if population statistics remained more effective among experts and policymakers, as Gregg Mitman has argued, these researchers' presentation of animals as named individuals was an effective strategy for obtaining public support (Mitman Reference Mitman, Daston and Mitman2005; see also Isenberg Reference Isenberg and Rothfels2002).

Finally, Goodall's use of naming was also a means of keeping track of multiple research subjects under challenging field conditions. Practically speaking, names tend to be easier for humans to remember than numbers and can thus serve as what Mattei Candea calls “mnemotechnic devices” for fieldwork (Candea Reference Candea2010, 250). In justifying her use of names for chimpanzees in her first popular book, In the Shadow of Man, published in 1971, Goodall focused on these practical benefits rather than the ethical stakes that she and other commentators later emphasized: “Some scientists feel that animals should be labeled by numbers – that to name them is anthropomorphic – but I have always been interested in the differences between individuals, and a name is not only more individual but also far easier to remember” (Goodall [Reference Goodall1971] Reference Goodall2000, 32; see Peterson Reference Peterson2006, 276). The focus in this passage is on individuality rather than on sentience or personhood and on fieldwork rather than activism. As such, it is strongly reminiscent of Nice's use of names for her banded song sparrows in the 1930s.

Within the field of primatology, other researchers such as Irven Devore were already naming the animals they studied before Goodall arrived in Tanganyika (Jolly Reference Jolly, Strum and Fedigan2000, 82) and continued to do so afterwards. Robert Sapolsky has described how he gave the baboons he studied in the 1970s the names of “prophets and matriarchs and judges left and right,” as well as the occasional descriptive name, though he also admits to having been “way too insecure in my science to publish technical papers using these names – everyone got a number then” (Sapolsky Reference Sapolsky2002, 14). In 1972, Douglas-Hamilton submitted a dissertation at Oxford that appears to have been the first one written under Tinbergen's supervision that used individual animal names rather than numbers or codes (Mitman Reference Mitman, Daston and Mitman2005). What is important about this development is not the use of names but rather their publication. Goodall may have been unusually courageous or stubborn in insisting on using these names in scientific publications, but the fact that she deployed them as tools of field research was not unusual.

While Goodall did not use artificial markers such as bands, tags, brands, or mutilation to recognize the chimps she named, she did depend on having a focal group of animals that was small, stable, and had been made sufficiently sedentary – with the help of abundant food provisioning – that individuals could be recognized without marking. As her work became well known and various students and other researchers became involved in the work at Gombe, these methods were augmented by the use of photographs, tape recorders, and check-sheets (Haraway Reference Haraway1989, 170–171; Peterson Reference Peterson2006, 275, 441–442). Such methods allowed chimpanzee behaviors to be reliably tracked no matter who was doing the observing. Dian Fossey, who began studying mountain gorillas soon after Goodall started her work with chimpanzees, similarly relied on technologies of identification, including sketches of the animals’ distinctive “noseprints,” to recognize them as individuals (Fossey Reference Fossey2001, 11). Articulations of human researchers and nonhuman primates did not take place simply through an immediate look of mutual recognition or touch, but instead became possible with the help of a range of technical mediations (cf. Haraway Reference Haraway2008, 249–265; see also Latour Reference Latour, Strum and Fedigan2000; Despret Reference Despret2004). Goodall's reliance on certain techniques of identification thus brings her practices closer to the standards of the time. In this context, naming appears not as a social and ethical claim but rather as one of a bevy of technologies of identification and individuation.

Perhaps what was most distinctive about Goodall's naming of Gombe's chimps is that it brought so many of these existing practices together and gave them a new meaning in the public eye. The naming of David Greybeard, Flo, Fifi, and so forth can be read in multiple ways: as a way of marking their incorporation into a quasi-pet-keeping-like relationship of food provision and care, as a way of facilitating their identification as narratively compelling individuals for the purpose of accumulating value, as a way of distinguishing among animals for the purposes of fieldwork, and as a way of making ethical and moral claims on their behalf as sentient nonhuman persons. It is the coming-together of so many different reasons that makes what would otherwise be a rather trivial dispute over a question of method – should researchers use names or numbers to identify their animal research subjects? – into an episode in the story of progress toward recognition of humanity's moral obligations to its closest surviving evolutionary relatives. Indeed, it may be the accumulation of all of these functions of personal naming that helps to produce persons, whether human or animal, who can be considered worthy of social and moral consideration in the first place.

Moreover, the history of the naming of research animals suggests that the distinction between numbering and naming is not as stark as it has often been portrayed both by Goodall and by scholars of human-animal relations. The use of numbers as labels in a context where names are available may be an indication of a tendency to objectify animals, but the use of names hardly ensures anthropomorphism, guarantees empathy, or necessarily undermines objectivity. In fact, the difference between naming and numbering may be rather insignificant in the context of daily research practices. Primatologist Frans De Waal has argued that the use of numeric codes to identify individual animals, often advocated by critics who warn against the temptations of anthropomorphism, is self-defeating, since “every observer who has tried number codes reports that after a while the numbers start to sound like names” (De Waal Reference De Waal2007, 44). A similar observation was made in 1976 by primatologist Claud Bramblett, who was skeptical of the significance of personal names such as David Graybeard or Flo in the work of Goodall and some of her peers: “Observers get just as emotionally involved with a subject labeled A772 as one named Orange (after the color of the animal's tag)” (Bramblett Reference Bramblett1976, 596). In light of the human ability to turn even the driest of numbers into a rich, meaning-laden symbol (see Lorimer Reference Lorimer2008), the taboo against naming seems likely to be ineffective. As pointed out by one primatologist interviewed by sociologist Amanda Rees: “the thing is, once you call an animal 33, that's his name, it becomes his name, his name is 33 as if you'd called him May or June” (Rees Reference Rees2001, 238).

What was distinctive about Goodall's naming practices, then, was not that she gave personal names rather than numbers to the animals she studied, nor even that she admitted to doing so in the scientific literature, but rather that she helped forge the link now largely taken for granted between naming and the attribution of personhood and sentience to individual animals – a link which would have been not at all obvious to many previous researchers. As noted above, Goodall's earliest descriptions of naming focused mainly on their usefulness for research purposes. The deployment of naming as a marker of certain ethical commitments seems to have strengthened with her own turn from research to conservation and animal-rights activism after a 1986 conference associated with the publication of her book The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986). In subsequent years, Goodall increasingly turned her attention to ending biomedical experimentation on chimpanzees and protecting the remaining free-living populations in Africa from hunting and habitat destruction (e.g., Goodall Reference Goodall1987; see Peterson Reference Peterson2006, 603–623). It was after this turn to activism that her use of personal names became not just a sign of her interest in individual differences and her disregard for scientific taboos about using personal names in the technical literature, but also a kind of shorthand for an array of ethical, social, and political claims. It was also at this point that numbering came to be portrayed as a strategy of depersonalization used by people committed to a certain understanding of objectivity. Naming, numbering, and the other various techniques of identification that animal behavior researchers developed in the twentieth century did not have any inherent ethical significance. Rather, they were tools that some scientists and conservationists chose to use to raise or to obscure questions about animals’ moral status in the public sphere (Rees Reference Rees2007, 889; Beinart Reference Beinart2001).