Animals Can Be Jerks.
Romantic visions of the animal world were dashed this week, as news of very bad behavior landed. I am a big fan of monkeys generally, so it pained me to read that some boy capuchins can be huge jerks. Some of these guys are kidnapping howler monkey babies.
Why should we care? Are there any parallels in human behavior? It gets worse than the kidnapping so fair warning.
I had hoped to find some reason to empathize with this situation. There must be a rationale, as there usually is in nature. These monkeys had lost their own babies, or they were eating the babies which, although sad and gross, is the way things work sometimes in the wild.
But no. Researchers don’t know why they are doing this, but it is neither of those things. They are grabbing those babies and just carrying them around for a while until they perish.
One strong possibility scientists have landed on is these chaps might just be bored. “On an island without predators, ‘that makes it less risky to do stupid things,’” Huh. They mention the cruel things young children sometimes do to animals as a potential parallel and the idea of innovation and boredom having a link. Having some free time for creative thinking can allow us to explore new ideas at any point in our lives, whereas a life entirely devoted to survival often does not. But do innovation and oblivious cruelty to others have a link, even a tangential one? Do they need to?
On an island without anyone keeping them in check, these guys are running amok in cruel ways. Maybe this piece of news from nature is something we human animals should pay attention to.
Photo by Nora Jane Long on Unsplash
Paying attention to our own nature’s and learning from nature is a core of Enatured