Today, the chimpanzees were being pretty playful, especially Missy and Burrito. I wasn’t able to get the best video while trying to play tug-o-war with Missy, but I got a short clip. Burrito was playing a lot with Jackie at the barn doors. You’ll want to watch until the very end!
rescue
Grooming
The chimps spend a good deal of each day grooming. Grooming serves a hygienic function, but it also helps to strengthen social bonds between individuals. In some ways, grooming is the glue that holds the group together.
The view from Young’s Hill
I managed to find the missing footage taken from the GoPro camera earlier this week. I think it’s interesting to see how the chimps see the world from within their enclosure.
As Jackie mentioned, most of the new posts that you can see in this video will be used to support a wood and fire hose bridge made by the Boy Scouts. While the scouts were working on this over the weekend, we put in about 20 other posts that will one day become climbing structures, tree houses, and crow’s nest lookouts. The money for some of these projects was donated during the fund-a-need portion of last year’s auction. Our goal is to connect all of the structures on Young’s Hill with bridges, beams, and fire hose so that the chimps can move around the two-acre enclosure without having to set foot on the ground.
This sanctuary is definitely a work in progress. But I mean that in a good way, in that we will always add new things and change others to keep life interesting for the chimps.
Relaxing Foxie
Burrito getting some shade
Foraging for native plants
One of our goals as a sanctuary is to give the chimps as much independence and autonomy as we can, given the inherent limitations of captivity. So we’re thrilled to see them finding their own food on Young’s Hill. Right now, their favorites include grass, dandelion leaves, and prickly lettuce. There are two bamboo groves on the hill, but the chimps haven’t taken much of an interest in eating them as of yet (climbing them is a different story). Of course, none of this will take the place of the meals we serve throughout the day, but it’s nice that the chimps can head out and grab a light snack whenever they want.
Violence
Recently, an infant chimpanzee at the L.A. Zoo was killed by an adult member of the troop in full view of zoo visitors. A few days later, a student volunteering at the Chimp Eden sanctuary in South Africa was pulled into an enclosure and attacked by two adult male chimpanzees. Both incidents served as startling reminders of the capacity for violence in our closest relatives and have left many people wondering what makes chimpanzees commit such severe acts of aggression.
Unfortunately, while incidents like these are rare, they are not abnormal. Put simply, violence is a fact of life in chimpanzee society. While males typically grab all the attention with their aggressive dominance struggles and their lethal intergroup raids, females also kill on occasion, with infants and other adult females being their most likely victims. In chimpanzee communities, severe aggression can be a means to reduce or prevent resource competition. This can result in the killing of members of other communities, as well as immigrant females and even infants within the troop. In some cases, the killing of an infant can increase mating opportunities for males. For instance, if a female gives birth, she will not enter estrus for another four to five years while she nurses and raises her new child. If that child dies, however, she will quickly become receptive again. Thus, there can be an incentive for a male who is not the parent to kill the infant so that he can mate with the mother (this is one reason primatologists believe that females may try to confuse paternity).
Violent behavior can serve many functions in chimpanzee society. What functions did these incidents at the L.A. Zoo and Chimp Eden serve? Honestly, we don’t know. It’s much easier to offer an evolutionary explanation for why violence exists in general than it is to explain specific acts.
As caregivers for captive chimpanzees, we witness aggressive behavior on a daily basis. Sometimes the motivation behind it is clear; other times we are left scratching our heads. The way I think about it is this: evolution has endowed chimpanzees with certain tendencies for aggressive behavior, but it does not control how those tendencies are applied. Aggression towards non-group members in the wild can help chimpanzees defend territory and the resources located therein. But that same aggressive tendency can also result in an attack on the very people trying to care for them in captivity.
All we really know is that violence in chimpanzees is not an aberration, nor is it all they are capable of. In fact, one of the reasons why we might be uncomfortable with chimpanzee violence is that it hits a little too close to home. To be sure, aggression in chimpanzees is shocking in its sheer physicality – teeth and fists instead of knives and guns. But even though chimpanzees exhibit higher rates of aggression overall, rates of lethal violence in chimpanzees are similar to those in some human societies. In some ways, we are more alike than we’d like to believe.