We describe 1) the victim’s social status, including his rise to and fall from alpha position, his peripheralization, and his attempts to reestablish himself in the male social group 2) circumstances surrounding his death 3) the treatment of his dead body by other community members and 4) events that occurred in the Fongoli chimpanzee community immediately after his death. We place our case in the context of his group. Here, we add to the database on lethal coalitionary aggression in providing an account of what appeared to be a lethal attack on a peripheral, former alpha male at the Fongoli savanna chimpanzee study site in Senegal (Foudouko). paniscus) compared to other Pan taxa (Wilson et al. 3) The behavior is less common in the West African chimpanzee subspecies ( P. 2) Most lethal events involve attacks on individuals from neighboring chimpanzee communities. Further patterns in the data include the following: 1) Most lethal aggression of weaned individuals involves adult males as both the victims and attackers. Instead, the authors concluded that an evolutionary adaptive explanation better fit the pattern of lethal aggression recorded in chimpanzees because indicators of competition intensity, such as the number of adult males within a community and population density, were the best predictors of lethal events (Wilson et al. The analyses did not support the hypothesis that anthropogenic disturbance caused lethal aggression in chimpanzees (Wilson et al. A recent summary of lethal events at 18 chimpanzee and 6 bonobo ( Pan paniscus) study sites representing 518 observer years of records found that intracommunity killing of weaned individuals was rare, with only 9 observed and inferred cases reported for a total 426 observation years (Wilson et al. Lethal aggression in and between chimpanzee communities has been reported at almost every long-term research site where these apes have been studied for more than a decade (Wilson et al. It is most common in chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes), one of the most intensively studied wild primates. This pattern may relate to differences in population densities, research effort, and subspecies differences in biology and behavior.Ĭoalitionary killing among adults has been reported in several nonhuman primate species but is rare (Wilson et al. Coalitionary killing is rare among West African chimpanzees compared to the East African chimpanzee ( P. We report attacks by multiple chimpanzees on his dead body, most frequently by a young adult male and an older female. We describe the male’s presence in the community, his overthrow, social peripheralization for >5 yr, and his attempt to rejoin the group as well as circumstances surrounding his death. We report an inferred lethal attack by resident males on a former alpha male chimpanzee ( P. Chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes) provide the largest sample of recorded lethal coalitionary aggression in nonhuman primates, and most long-term chimpanzee study sites have recorded coalitionary killing of conspecifics. The attack lasted 12 minutes, which must have felt like an eternity.Lethal coalitionary aggression is of significant interest to primatologists and anthropologists given its pervasiveness in human, but not nonhuman, animal societies. Nash’s injuries were so serious that an officer presumably couldn’t tell her gender. “Hey listen,” one officer said over the radio, “We’ve got to get this out of here. He’s got no face.” “It just opened up one of the patrol cars and we had to let a couple go,” an officer said into a radio.Īt that point, Travis went running back through the house. Some officers gave chase while others tended to the victim. Officers remained in their vehicles at first. Herold did the same.īut at some point, Travis the chimp tried to get into a squad car. Then came this over the crackle of the radio: “Person down, chimp outside.” When police arrived, she continued shouting to them to “shoot him!”. “Shoot him,” Herold kept shouting into the phone. “Tell them to shoot him. Tell them to shoot him. Tell them to shoot him.” Nash was not dead, but was severely disfigured. Wednesday, she remained in critical condition at a local hospital. “Bring the guns. You have to kill this chimp.”.Herold is at times frantic, at times sobbing. Travis could be heard squealing in the background. “They got to shoot him because I tried stabbing him and it didn’t work. They gotta shoot him,” she said. In that graphic 911 call, Herold, the primate’s owner, implored police to shoot the animal as it was attacking her friend, Charla Nash, 55. Herold had asked Nash to come over to help calm the chimp when he started acting up. “He looked at me like, ‘Mom, what did you do?’ I tried to pull him but he was to strong, so I called 911 and told them to get up here as fast as possible.”
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