If you had asked me when I was ten years old what I wanted to do," Douglas-Hamilton says, "I'd have said: I want to have an airplane; I want to fly around Africa and save the animals." Later, while studying zoology at Oxford University, he found his goals hadn't changed. "Science for me was a passport to the bush he says, not the other way around I became a scientist so I could live a life in Africa and be in the bush." Early in his career in Africa, he went to Tanzania as a research volunteer in Lake Manyara National Park. He bought himself a small airplane, which he could use for tracking elephants.