Deborah Moore was closing in on 40, with just a high school diploma and a dead-end job selling spices to restaurants in Atlanta when she decided it was time to follow her dream.

Fast forward seven years and there was Deborah, trekking across the East African savanna, studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania for her doctoral thesis.

“When she was 10 years old she loved Jane Goodall,” said her mother, Florence Moore of Manotick. “She loved all the National Geographic specials on TV. But it was just something that she never thought she could do.”

Deborah died March 22 in Ottawa after a six-year battle with cancer. She was 51.

Florence recalled when Deborah, then 37, revealed her plans to pursue her Ph.D., nearly 20 years after she’d graduated from Bell High School.

“I remember telling her, ‘You’re going to be 50 by the time you finish!” Florence said. “She said, ‘Mom, I’m going to be 50 anyway’.”

Deborah Moore was born Oct. 6, 1964 in Montreal, the youngest of four children of Florence and Ralph Moore. The family moved to Ottawa when Deborah was less than a year old.

Deborah was a bright student, but never applied herself to her school work, Florence said. But always there were animals. “She loved, loved, loved them. But in the wild. She couldn’t stand to see them caged.”

After high school, Deborah studied to be a paramedic, but never worked at the job. She took accounting at Carleton, but dropped out of first year.

Deborah wasn’t a party girl, but she did like to have fun. Bored with Ottawa, she and a friend loaded their possessions into a Ford Focus and headed to the U.S. In those pre-9/11 days, saying they were going camping was enough to be waved through customs.

Eventually, Deborah got a green card and fashioned a career — of sorts — working as a salesperson for a spice supply company in Atlanta. It was then she decided she needed a change.

“She just decided ‘Eff-it!'” said her sister, Flo. “That’s probably exactly what she said. She said this is what I want to do and this is what I’m going to do.”

Deborah enrolled at Georgia State University, graduating in 2006 with her B.A. “with highest distinction.” She continued her studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, earning her M.A. in 2009 and her Ph.D. in 2013.

“She has to be one of the most determined people I’ve ever met,” said Mimi Arandjelovic, another primate researcher who worked with Deborah at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany.

“She was a mature student who went back to university. That’s already pretty daunting, because you have to be with a bunch of 20-year-olds. But to go to a field site where there’s not really any logistical support and to go and do research on your own — totally incredible,” Arandjelovic said.

“I don’t think any of us can actually say why we are in this field. But I know it was something that she always wanted to do. I know that when her father passed (in 2008)  it had a really big effect on her and she said, ‘I really want to pursue my dream.’ ”

In Tanzania, Deborah followed a troupe of ‘unhabituated’ chimps — apes that weren’t used to human contact and would flee if people got too close. She travelled there alone, hitching rides on a truck for as far as she could, then sleeping at the side of the road until the next truck came along. Sometimes, she could hear hyenas howling in the night, Flo said.

It was in Tanzania she first noticed a lump in a breast. She made her way to a nearby village, found a doctor and insisted he do a biopsy.

Her cancer fears confirmed, Deborah returned to Ottawa for treatment and underwent a mastectomy before leaving for Germany to analyze the data she had collected. Her year in Leipzig was one of the happiest times of her life.

“She was so easy and uncomplicated,” Arandjelovic said. “What I really respected about her was that she was always herself. Even if her opinion wasn’t that popular, she would never back down. But she had such a special way of doing it without hurting anybody’s feelings or coming off as aggressive or negative.”

In Germany, Deborah learned the cancer had spread into her lymph nodes. She returned to Canada for more treatment and to write her Ph.D. thesis.

Meanwhile, she was laying the groundwork for her next adventure, researching bonobos in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Bonobos, like chimpanzees, are humans’ closest cousins in the animal world. But unlike the territorial and aggressive chimps, bonobos are known as the ‘hippies’ of the great apes, a generally peaceful, matriarchal society that uses sex, not conflict, to resolve disputes.

“Bonobos are the last-discovered and the least-known of the great apes,” said Michael Hurley, executive director the Washington, D.C.-based Bonobo Conservation Initiative. “They exemplify all the best aspects of our nature.”

In May 2014, Deborah headed back to Africa to a BCI conservation area in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the only country in the world where bonobos live. She was the first scientist to work at the site, home to several troupes of habituated bonobos.

“It’s the Congo – the Heart of Darkness – it’s some of the most beautiful rainforest in the world,” Hurley said. “There’s not a paved road in the area. It’s very difficult to get around, you walk through the forest or travel on rivers.”

Deborah wrote about her adventures in the DRC in a 2014 blog she posted about her fieldwork.

“They (bonobos) move very quickly through the dense undergrowth, and it is extremely difficult to keep up with them, especially for me!” she wrote. “My previous fieldwork was conducted in the savannah-woodlands of Tanzania, and the rainforest is definitely a challenge to navigate through.”

She observed the bonobos interact with their neighbours, at times peaceful, at times aggressive.

“Like many generalizations, the portrayal of bonobos as entirely peaceful is not supported,” she wrote. “We have witnessed nine encounters between the two groups thus far, and they have ranged from somewhat peaceful events with a lot of sexual behaviour, to extremely aggressive encounters, with bonobos falling from the trees during physical fights and the sounds of bonobo screams filling the forest.”

Deborah was only a couple of months into her planned year-long stay when she experienced pain in her sternum so intense she had to be airlifted to hospital. The cancer was back, this time in her bones.

Deborah came home to Canada and began more chemotherapy and radiation. Last fall doctors told her the cancer had spread to her liver. She died in hospital, with family members at her side.

“I was so proud of her,” Florence Moore said. “If it wasn’t for the cancer I don’t think she would have ever come home again. She loved Africa. She loved its people.”

“It is very sad, but on the other hand, she accomplished so many of her goals. By the end she was at peace.”

She is survived by her mother and her siblings, April, Stephen and Flo. A memorial service will be held  April 30 in the Capital Memorial Garden in Manotick.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Twitter.com/getBAC