After a lifetime of studying, filming and fostering understanding of wild chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Dr Jane Goodall has begun a passionate defence of keeping the animals in captivity.

Dr Goodall, 74, who is president of the animal rights organisation Advocates for Animals, was speaking at Edinburgh Zoo yesterday, where she opened a new £1.6 million enclosure housing colonies of squirrel and capuchin monkeys. Its supporters say that it will help in the understanding of primate and human behaviour.

However, Dr Goodall, was aware that not everyone shares her goodwill toward zoos. Last month, another new enclosure, the £5.6million Budongo Trail, was opened in Edinburgh for chimpanzees. Although it is the largest of its type in the world, and includes a strong research component, it came under attack from the singer Morrissey, a long-time opponent of caging animals. He called for a boycott, urging parents to take their children to their local abattoir instead, “for a lesson they would never forget”.

Dr Goodall said that the choice for conservationists was between “playing safe” and protecting vulnerable species, or leaving them in the wild at the mercy of human activity.

“In an ideal world chimpanzees and monkeys would be out in the wild as they were intended to be. But in the real world, there are not so many places like that and they are getting smaller all the time.

“The choice is between living in wonderful facilities like these where they are probably better off or living the wild in an area like Budongo, where one in six gets caught in a wire snare, and countries like Congo, where chimpanzees, monkeys and gorillas are shot for food commercially. If I were a chimpanzee, I know what I would choose,” said Dr Goodall.

She began her research in Tanzania in the early 1960s, where she discovered the first use of tools in a non-human primate species. Her work became the foundation of future primatological research and in 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to protect chimpanzees and their habitats.

As habitats have been destroyed, it is estimated that the number of chimpanzees in the Congo basin have declined from an estimated 2 million in 1910 to about 220,000.

Dr Goodall blamed the international logging companies for driving roads into the rainforests and speeding up the despoliation of the natural landscape. Hunters are supplying urban markets with fresh meats, including chimpanzee, gorilla and elephant.

But Dr Goodall remained hopeful. She said: “I am optimistic because of the kids. Some of them are so political. These huge corporations which are responsible for an awful lot of destruction of the natural world, are run by individuals with children and grandchildren like them. That is where we can change things.”