infants belonging to adult females in the group. Relatively small gelada groups forage independently during the day, but reunite and cluster together on nighttime sleeping cliffs. In one notable instance, Fashing’s team saw a female carrying a dead infant belonging to a mother from another group; this female groomed the body and allowed a juvenile female to do the same.
HESTER WITH THE DEAD INFANT HISHAM.
PHOTO BY RYAN J. BURKE.
Even keeping in mind the conservation-of-energy hypothesis for wild animals, I found it surprising that mother monkeys in general don’t show more discernible evidence of grief. During my fourteen months in Kenya, I found the Amboseli baboons to be closely attuned to each other, smart and strategic in their actions, and ready to defend allies and friends. In reading published accounts and talking to other primatologists, though, I was forced to conclude that little evidence for monkey grief has emerged from observation alone.
In fact, the report by Fashing and his colleagues contains descriptive passages that increase my sense of caution about concluding that monkeys mourn. Two geladas, a mother-infant pair named Tesla and Tussock, died in April 2010. Tesla, the mother, had been severely weakened by sickness that followed from a parasitic infection. During the period of her illness, two younger females helped her out by carrying Tussock, her seven-month-old daughter. But when Tesla became too ill to leave the group’s sleeping cliff, the other geladas departed to forage without her. Slowly, Tesla and Tussock managed to move to a spot about 175 meters from their sleeping position. When the group returned to the cliff that night, Tesla and Tussock’s new position wouldn’t have been visible to them. None of the geladas showed any apparent concern for their missing groupmates, and none searched for Tesla and Tussock. The next morning, the primatologists found Tesla dead. Throughout that day, Tussock, now on her own, stayed by her mother’s body, “crying plaintively and rocking side-to-side.” The next morning, the infant too was found dead.
It seems likely to me that Tussock felt something upon her mother’s death. How could she not have felt afraid, left alone in the cold, outside the protective web of her group, with her mother lying inert and unresponsive? If she felt grief, she suffered it alone. When I asked Tyler Barry, one of the primatologists at Guassa at the time of these events, for his interpretation of what Tussock might have been feeling, he said, “I would not feel comfortable arguing that Tussock was feeling grief as she cried and rocked. I am pretty sure she hadn’t had milk for almost two days at that point and was probably dehydrated and reaching starvation point. I am sure the cold is what killed her in the end, though, and also may have been a cause of the rocking.”
Barry confirmed that Tesla and Tussock’s location, away from their sleeping cliff, meant that their suffering would have gone unnoticed by their group. “There was a bachelor group that glanced down at Tesla’s dead body the morning of the second day,” he recalled, “but other than that they were too far away from the normal sleeping spot for the main herd to even hear Tussock.” Gelada males, then, who were not Tesla’s regular associates, showed a brief curiosity response to her body, but the monkeys who might have mourned were too far away.
If grief does accompany the act of maternal corpse-carrying in monkeys, or an infant monkey’s solitary vigil at the side of her dead mother, we cannot know it from observation. So far, the null hypothesis, which predicts no great expenditure of energy on grief by wild monkeys, remains formidable.
Primatologists Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, among the world’s leading experts on wild monkey behavior, take note of monkeys’ lack of visible grief in their book
Baboon Metaphysics
. When monkeys carry infants who are dying, these scientists
HESTER WITH THE DEAD INFANT HISHAM.
PHOTO BY RYAN J. BURKE.
Even keeping in mind the conservation-of-energy hypothesis for wild animals, I found it surprising that mother monkeys in general don’t show more discernible evidence of grief. During my fourteen months in Kenya, I found the Amboseli baboons to be closely attuned to each other, smart and strategic in their actions, and ready to defend allies and friends. In reading published accounts and talking to other primatologists, though, I was forced to conclude that little evidence for monkey grief has emerged from observation alone.
In fact, the report by Fashing and his colleagues contains descriptive passages that increase my sense of caution about concluding that monkeys mourn. Two geladas, a mother-infant pair named Tesla and Tussock, died in April 2010. Tesla, the mother, had been severely weakened by sickness that followed from a parasitic infection. During the period of her illness, two younger females helped her out by carrying Tussock, her seven-month-old daughter. But when Tesla became too ill to leave the group’s sleeping cliff, the other geladas departed to forage without her. Slowly, Tesla and Tussock managed to move to a spot about 175 meters from their sleeping position. When the group returned to the cliff that night, Tesla and Tussock’s new position wouldn’t have been visible to them. None of the geladas showed any apparent concern for their missing groupmates, and none searched for Tesla and Tussock. The next morning, the primatologists found Tesla dead. Throughout that day, Tussock, now on her own, stayed by her mother’s body, “crying plaintively and rocking side-to-side.” The next morning, the infant too was found dead.
It seems likely to me that Tussock felt something upon her mother’s death. How could she not have felt afraid, left alone in the cold, outside the protective web of her group, with her mother lying inert and unresponsive? If she felt grief, she suffered it alone. When I asked Tyler Barry, one of the primatologists at Guassa at the time of these events, for his interpretation of what Tussock might have been feeling, he said, “I would not feel comfortable arguing that Tussock was feeling grief as she cried and rocked. I am pretty sure she hadn’t had milk for almost two days at that point and was probably dehydrated and reaching starvation point. I am sure the cold is what killed her in the end, though, and also may have been a cause of the rocking.”
Barry confirmed that Tesla and Tussock’s location, away from their sleeping cliff, meant that their suffering would have gone unnoticed by their group. “There was a bachelor group that glanced down at Tesla’s dead body the morning of the second day,” he recalled, “but other than that they were too far away from the normal sleeping spot for the main herd to even hear Tussock.” Gelada males, then, who were not Tesla’s regular associates, showed a brief curiosity response to her body, but the monkeys who might have mourned were too far away.
If grief does accompany the act of maternal corpse-carrying in monkeys, or an infant monkey’s solitary vigil at the side of her dead mother, we cannot know it from observation. So far, the null hypothesis, which predicts no great expenditure of energy on grief by wild monkeys, remains formidable.
Primatologists Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, among the world’s leading experts on wild monkey behavior, take note of monkeys’ lack of visible grief in their book
Baboon Metaphysics
. When monkeys carry infants who are dying, these scientists
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