Shocking Cruelty That Isn’t Actually Exclusive To Us

It turns out chimps can also be rather mean. Are we leaving better to someone else?

Image by Sarah Peets

I just read about the Chimpanzee War in Gombe (human Tanzania) in the 1970s. It was originally reported on by primatologist extraordinaire Jane Goodall. Having studied chimps for many years, she was still shocked to observe the cruel behaviour some of them displayed.

In Gombe, a fraction had splintered from the main tribe, and when one of the rebels was brutally murdered by a gang of the original family, all hell broke loose. It wasn’t a fight, it wasn’t a battle, it was war: for four years, the attacks between factions were as constant as they were calculated, attacks that proved that cruelty wasn’t exclusive to humans. Groups of four and five male chimpanzees would stealthily ambush a solitary rival, then pin him down and beat him up for up to ten minutes.

There we have it, then: if we thought that killing each other made us humans special, we can think again. Primate violence is also mainly carried out by males against males, so even there we fail to be original. The article on the monkey war was sad, but it made me think about our place in history.

I’ve written before about how, witnessing my two cats, I’ve come to the conclusion that…