Peony

Peony had arthritis and was very old, so she could barely move. She would try to climb into a climbing frame where a bunch of chimps were sitting and grooming each other. She wanted to join them, but she could barely get in there. The younger females would walk up to her, put their hands on her behind, and start pushing until she was up there with the rest. We’ve also seen cases where she started walking towards a water faucet, but, since it’s a very large enclosure and she walked with so much difficulty, a younger female would run ahead of her, take water in her own mouth, walk back to Peony, and then spit the water into her mouth so she wouldn’t need to walk all the way to the faucet. 

-- Frans de Waal

Monkeys with money and guns

Mandrill

Chapter 10 Japanese macaque

page 154: female assisted by a male to whom she grants privileges. In The Serpent's Promise, Steve Jones writes:

A male macaque was once observed to mate forty times in a day, which was more than the champion stud among thousands of men interviewed by Alfred Kinsey for his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male managed in a week.

page 162: More on The Descent of Man at Five Books. Frans de Waal develops the point. As a recent review puts it

Mr de Waal’s central concern is to attack the idea that what humans call morality stands apart from, and above, anything found in the “lower” animals. Most people, he notes, accept that their bodies evolved from those of man’s predecessors, but the conceits of religion and philosophy make it much harder to accept that the same is true of human minds and behaviour, no matter how good the evidence.

page 166: Machiavelli's own beliefs [may be] better reflected in his Discources on Livy. Would Isaiah Berlin agree? 

Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values...Yet he is, in spite of himself, one of the makers of pluralism, and of its—to him—perilous acceptance of toleration.

page 168: [a] book less amenable to sectarian interpretation. Sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing are central to the Hebrew bible, notes Stephen Pinker in chapter 1 of The Better Angels of Our Nature. [1] For example:

In Deuteronomy 20 and 21, God gives the Israelites a blanket policy for dealing with cities that don't accept them as overlords: smite the males with edge of the sword and abduct the cattle, women and children. Of course, a man with a beautiful new captive faces a problem: since he has just murdered her parents and brothers, she may not be in the mood for love. God anticipates this nuisance and offers the following solution: the captor should shave her head, pare her nails and imprison her in his house for a month while she cries her eyes out. Then he may go in and rape her.

page 164: a high value on...fairness. See monkeys stay away from mean people.

page 168: endangered species. A recent UNEP reports notes that nearly 3,000 chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans are illegally killed or stolen from the wild each year. A story today on the plus side: there may be more habitat for an endangered cao vit gibbon on the border of China and Vietnam than feared.


Footnote [1]. A reported fall in violent crime in Britain looks like data that supports Pinker's central thesis.

This is the eleventh in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

The origin of laughter

Ed Yong has the story:

It didn't arise out of nowhere, but gradually developed over 10-16 million years of evolution by exaggerating the acoustics of our ancestors. At the very least, we should now be happy to describe the noises made by tickled apes as laughter without accusations of anthropomorphism, and to consider "laughter" as a trait that applies to primates and other animals.

See also BBC report

Part human

In an opinion piece on the consequences of "our ongoing inability to see animals outside our own fraught frame of reference", Charles Siebert mentions an image made by Nicolaes Tulp of a chimpanzee landed at the Hague in 1641

The creature — seated atop a boulder with its mostly hairless torso and limbs, tapered elfin hands and feet, and sweetly smiling face — looks like a potbellied forest nymph dreamily sleeping off a good drunk. Not a chimpanzee so much as an ape-human hybrid.

I haven't found a copy of this on the web (only this) but did find the image above by the late 17th century physician Edward Tyson.

Tyson's engraving is included in a set of materials about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. His Philological essay concerning the pygmies of the ancients was republished in 1894 with a preface by Bertram C. A. Windle which suggests that while in Tyson's day it may have been reasonable to suppose that apes were the pygmies of ancient times, human imagination can make create stranger things from less evidence.

P.S 9 March: Siebert's starting point is behaviour in chimps that humans find horrendous but which is occasioned by the way chimps have been treated by humans. An interesting but less dramatic example would be 'planned' stone attacks

Captives

Ben Beck...once noted that if you give a screw-driver to a chimpanzee it will try to use the tool for everything except its intended purpose. Give one to a gorilla and it will rear back in horror -- "Oh my God, it's going to hurt me" -- then try to eat it, and ultimately forget about it. Give it to an orangutan, however, and the ape will first hide it and then, once you have gone, use it to dismantle the cage.

-- Eugene Linden

(Jason Hribal is angrier)

682

...is the estimated number of mountain gorillas still living in the wild. Of these, about 302 are thought to be in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and 380 in Virunga National Park (Mountain gorillas in dire straits, DNA reveals).

P.S. 30 Jan: 'ten babies' born in Virunga.

Something like gold

Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas...Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.

-- from Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas.


See also Congo riches are plundered by renegade army brigade and these posts from Grains of Sand.

You lookin' at me?

If the mammal face is an instrument for communication, the primate face is a Stradivarius.

-- Karl Zimmer on the study of the face and communication since Darwin.

According to Michael Tomasello, one of the few truly distinctive human features is visible whites to the eyes [1].

Footnote

[1] but the origin of the famous line is Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw in 1743

Beast

'Peaceful' bonobos have been observed hunting: they may corner and feast on a still-living duiker, tearing out and eating its guts even as the animal is still screaming. (See Loving bonobos have a carnivorous dark side).

But predation and aggression are distinct behaviours, says Frans de Waal: there are, for example, aggressive herbivores such as bison and sociable carnivores such as lionesses. "For me, this finding does very little to change the idea of bonobos as relatively peaceful primates."

Ownership and collapse

Fisheries in which individuals (or groups of) fishermen have a right to a share can provide incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse, says research based on a study of 11,135 fisheries from 1950 to 2003 [1]. But, warn the authors:

Despite the dramatic impact catch shares have had on fishery collapse, these results should not be taken as a carte blanche endorsement. First, we have restricted attention to one class of catch shares (ITQs). Second, only by appropriately matching institutional reform with ecological, economic, and social characteristics can maximal benefits be achieved.

On land, there may be almost no level of killing of some animals (such as great apes and other primates taken as bush meat in Africa) which allows a viable population to survive. Nevertheless, argues a report, the best way to reduce the slaughter is for hunting by local people to be legalised and regulated [2]. Also, it's suggested, new ways should be found of making endangered animals more valuable alive than dead, perhaps through government schemes to reward local villages financially if they preserve or increase populations. But, warns one conservationist, "People living in poverty are in for dire times, and both they and many species are heading for a train wreck."


Notes

[1] Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse? by Christopher Costello, Steven D. Gaines and John Lynham. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159478. [Peter Kareiva, Amy Chang and Michelle Marvier argue "the key to success in conservation is the development of market mechanisms and new sources of finance for conservation." (DOI: 10.1126/science.1162756) ]

[2] CBD Report 33 by Robert Nasi et al from CIFOR , discussed in Should we legalise hunting of endangered species? by Andy Coghlan, New Scientist, 18 Sep. "In central Africa, 1 million tonnes of bushmeat are harvested each year, supplying 80 per cent of the protein and fat that people in the region consume." (More photos of bush meat, some of them disturbing, can be found here.)