How Animals Grieve (13 page)

Even so, when a lion brings down a zebra, or a fox snatches a rabbit, the animal hunters aren’t stigmatized as violent. But what of these Ngogo chimpanzees filmed by Watts? They are shown engineering, with shrieking abandon, the horrific end of one of their own; Grapelli belonged not just to the same species but to the same community as the attackers.

Watts does describe the empathetic response of one of the males who refused to join in the attack mob, and who stayed near Grapelli as much as he could. The vast majority of males, though, showed no such mercy, and certainly nothing like the gentleness shown by Ham to his human friend at the National Zoo. Is it just that in Ham’s case, the chimpanzee drained out of him after he was stolen from his Cameroonian home? So long subjected to the press of human needs—first as a guinea pig in the space program, later as entertainment for zoo visitors—did Ham become only the palest reflection of a wild chimpanzee?

It’s easy to be swept away by the picture of chimpanzee aggression I’ve painted here, but there’s another side to wild chimpanzees too, a side that brings us much closer to Ham. The expression of chimpanzee grief, in the wild as well as in captivity, has complicated the picture of what is understood to be “natural” for chimpanzees. Arguably the most famous example of grief in the animal world, dated to 1972, is the juvenile chimpanzee Flint’s loss of will to live following the death of his mother Flo.

At Gombe, Flint had enjoyed his mother’s undivided attention well beyond his infancy. His younger sibling Flame—Flo’s last-born off
spring—
had died, leaving him the emotional center of his mother’s aging life. As Goodall wrote in
In the Shadow of Man
, except for nursing (because Flo’s milk had dried up), “Flint again became Flo’s baby. She shared her food with him; she permitted him to climb onto her back or even on occasions cling to her belly. She groomed him constantly and, as of old, she welcomed him into her bed at night.” These patterns of behavior persisted until Flint was over six years old, and even after that point, mother and son remained abnormally close. Flo died when Flint was eight years old, and he was unprepared to cope. In a passage from Goodall’s later book
Through a Window
, we glimpse the depth of Flint’s loss: “The last time I saw him alive, he was hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed, huddled in the vegetation close to where Flo had died. . . . The last short journey he made, pausing to rest every few feet, was to the very place where Flo’s body had lain.” Only three weeks after his mother’s death, Flint died too, of causes that Goodall unflinchingly attributes to depression and the resultant weakening of his immune system.

When the situation is reversed—when, against the natural pattern, mother chimpanzees lose their loved offspring to death—that loss too may be felt acutely felt. Just as wild monkey mothers do, chimpanzee mothers sometimes carry their babies after death. And occasionally, just as with monkey mothers, a chimpanzee mother may seem unable to stop the corpse-carrying, even though the body is rotting in her hands.

In chimpanzees, emotional ties between mothers and their offspring may be intense. In the wild, great ape babies nurse from and ride on the mother for four years or more. When these babies die, they may continue to ride on their mother’s body, simply because the mother refuses to part with them. At Bossou, in the West African country of Guinea, a respiratory epidemic swept through the chimpanzee community in 2003. Two infants under the age of three, Jimato and Vene, were among the victims. Their mothers, Jire and Vuavua, carried the infants’ bodies for sixty-eight days and nineteen days respectively. I find Jire’s sixty-eight-day commitment to her infant’s dead body astonishing; just think of her burdened with that tiny corpse for an entire summer, the equivalent of July Fourth to Labor Day and a little bit beyond.

Vuavua’s nineteen-day carry, as it turns out, overlapped with Jire’s
longer
one. Did one mother pass the other in the forest, look into her eyes, and acknowledge a shared loss? Did each mentally revisit times when her child was alive, nursing close against her body? Intruding into these sentimental thoughts is a grim reality. The mothers must have experienced terrible sights and smells, judging from a report by primatologist Dora Biro and her colleagues. The infants’ bodies became mummified, just as the monkey infants’ corpses that we discussed in the previous chapter had: the hair was lost, and the limbs and other body parts turned leathery. “Because of wearing effects of prolonged carrying,” Biro’s team wrote, “by the time Jire abandoned Jimato’s body, much of the body cranial structure had been destroyed, making most facial features unrecognizable.”

WILD CHIMPANZEES IN UGANDA: ALPHA MALE NICK, FEMALE KALEMA, AND KALEMA’S FIVE-YEAR-OLD SON.
PHOTO BY LIRAN SAMUNI.

The mothers shooed away flies from their babies’ bodies, and even groomed the corpses. Sometimes, infant and juvenile chimpanzees were allowed to borrow a body and carry it in playful ways. Do such actions mean that the mothers persisted in their carrying because they couldn’t discern that the infants had died? I doubt it. For one thing, the carrying techniques used by the moms varied greatly from those normally used
with
healthy infants. For another, chimpanzees are capable of complex reasoning, thinking strategically, step by step, about how to solve foraging problems with tools, or social challenges with deft manipulation of allies. While it’s impossible to prove that chimpanzees understand anything about death, it’s equally impossible for me to think that chimpanzee mothers could judge the dead babies—unbreathing, unfeeling, and rotting—to be alive.

Of course, Jire and Vuavua are females. The brutality that I described earlier, visited on Grapelli in the Ngogo community, was orchestrated by males. Beyond the behavior of juveniles like Flint, is there a place for male sensitivity to death among chimpanzees living in the wild, a gentleness akin to Ham’s expressed in captivity?

In the first-published scientific review of primate death, James R. Anderson describes an event that took place in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa, in 1989:

In the Tai Forest, a fatal leopard attack on an adolescent female chimpanzee caused an outburst of loud calling and aggressive displays by males, who initially dragged the body over short distances. . . . Contacts with the body were frequent, including grooming and some gentle shaking. Interestingly, infants were prevented from approaching the body. Again, after several hours the corpse was abandoned.

In a bare-bones sense, Anderson’s summary is accurate. Yet it misses the nuance—indeed, the significance—of what happened that day at Tai. Anderson’s selective reporting echoes a situation that I noted in
chapter 6
. There I cited a paper by Anne Engh and colleagues that reported a hormonal spike in bereaved female baboons relative to other baboons. Devoted to statistical results, the paper included no observations of grief in the monkeys. Its genesis, however, was Engh’s witnessing of grief symptoms in a female whose daughter had been killed by a predator. The peer-reviewed scientific literature—including Engh’s and Anderson’s papers—favors statistical results and bare summaries over descriptive passages. Yet it is in descriptive details that a topography of animal grief will emerge.

Precisely this needed detail can be found in
The Chimpanzees of Tai Forest
by primatologists Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann.
There
the anecdote summarized by Anderson is presented in full, and the narrative strongly suggests that even adult male chimpanzees may respond to a companion’s death with thought and compassion. In the forest, the chimpanzee Tina was found dead by Tai field assistant Gregoire Nohon. Viscera protruded through her stomach. An autopsy later showed that she had died when a leopard bit through her the second cervical (neck) vertebra. Four months previous, Tina’s mother had also died. Since that time, Tina, age ten, and her little brother Tarzan, age five, had been traveling with Brutus, the community’s alpha male. From what they could see of Tarzan’s actions, Boesch and Boesch-Achermann concluded that he longed to be adopted by Brutus. Sometimes, he even shared Brutus’s night nest. Only after the discovery of Tina’s body did these two scientists realize just how tight the ties were within the trio of Tina, Tarzan, and Brutus.

The Boesches found a dozen chimpanzees, six females and six males, sitting in silence around the body. Over the next hours, some of the highly aroused males performed displays around the corpse. Some touched Tina. In a period of eighty minutes, males Ulysse, Macho, and Brutus groomed the body for nearly an hour. Ulysse and Macho hadn’t been seen to groom Tina at all when she was living; other males in the community had groomed her only for brief periods. Here, then, was a new and unexpected behavior. Further, some chimpanzees gently shook Tina’s body, as if trying to solve the puzzle of her stillness.

Other chimpanzees played gently together near the body. To engage in play around a dead companion may seem a strange choice, but how many of us have joined in joking and laughing during the long hours of a wake or memorial service? The urge to play verbally may be a natural way to remember happy times spent with the one now deceased, or it may represent a discharge of nervous energy at an emotionally trying time. The Boesches think that perhaps the chimpanzees needed to expel the tension caused by Tina’s violent death, and that playing and even laughing near the corpse allowed them to do this.

About two and a half hours after Tina’s body was first discovered, Tarzan walked up to his big sister. By this point, other young chimpanzees had been run off by Brutus, who acted as a sort of gatekeeper. “Tarzan came to smell gently over different parts of the body,” Boesch
and
Boesch-Achermann reported, “and he inspected her genitals. He was the only infant allowed to do this.” Tarzan groomed his sister, and pulled on her hand. While this scene was playing out, Brutus chased Xeres and Xindra, a mother-daughter pair, from the area.

That Tarzan spent time with his sister, unlike other young chimpanzees and even some adults, was no random outcome. Brutus brought it about in a thoughtful way. An eminently smart chimpanzee, Brutus played a key role in the Tai community, particularly as a hunter. At Tai, the males hunt cooperatively for monkey. The “moves” needed for a successful capture in the thick forest take years to learn, especially because multiple males must work together strategically, taking specific, conscious steps to aid each other rather than charging in “every male for himself” and hoping for a good result. Mastering hunting skills among the Tai chimpanzees takes twenty years, with the most complex skills taking another ten years more.

And Brutus was a star hunter. He was, during the observation period highlighted by the Boesches in their book, the best meat provider of the community. His cognitive feats were unmatched by any other male, especially his performance of what is called double-anticipation hunting. On a number of occasions, Brutus mentally calculated not only the imminent moves of his monkey prey, but also those of his fellow chimpanzee hunters. In anticipating their actions, Brutus showed that he could reflect upon the mental state of others. In scientific lingo, Brutus has a theory of mind; he bases his own actions in part on an awareness that other intelligent creatures may act or feel in ways different from his own.

These capabilities were, I believe, fully engaged on the day of Tina’s death. Brutus recognized that Tarzan, alone of all the young chimpanzees at Tai, needed time to inspect his sister’s body and to mourn over it. Unlike Flint, grieving alone over his mother Flo’s body, Tarzan mourned as part of a social community, because the alpha male of that community recognized his relationship with his sister. I would even venture to call the Tai chimpanzees’ response to Tina’s death a “wake” of sorts, because so many apes gathered around the body.

All told, chimpanzees stayed constantly with Tina’s body for six hours and fifteen minutes. Brutus himself spent four hours and fifty minutes with her, only interrupting that vigil for seven minutes. Eventually, the
chimpanzees
left the area around Tina’s body. Two days later, a leopard consumed part of the carcass. In this way, becoming part of another animal, Tina vanished back into the natural world. Or to put it another way, she remained part of the natural world. We are left to wonder what Tarzan, Brutus, and her other social partners thought about or remembered of Tina in the weeks and months that followed.

In
Ape
, a volume in the fabulous “Animal” series published by Reaktion Books, John Sorenson notes the strange blend of factors that makes up humans’ response to our closest living relatives: “Although much effort goes into denying our proximity to other apes,” Sorenson writes, “we are fascinated by their resemblance to us and by possibilities of transgressing the border separating us.” We stare at chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans in zoos and on film, seeing almost but not quite human selves looking back at us. Watching movies, TV shows, or commercials, we may chuckle at chimpanzees dressed in clothes, drinking out of teacups, or wearing suits and carrying out tasks in a modern office. Often in these scenarios, something goes slightly amiss, and the rules of everyday life are broken. “Watching the chaos,” Sorenson tells us, “we can see, in a safely managed way, what things would be like if we did not maintain control of the situation and of ourselves.”