I saw this picture on a blog that I follow, ICCI (International Cognition and Culture Institute). The picture is riveting. We don’t expect to see chimps line up to pay homage to a much loved chimp as it is being wheeled to its burial. What rivets us in part is how human this picture is.
This is not the first documented evidence of chimps grieving. Jane Goodall wrote this moving piece in Through A Window, about a chimp grieving the death of his mother:
“Never shall I forget watching as, three days after Flo’s death, Flint climbed slowly into a tall tree near the stream. He walked along the branches, then stopped and stopped motionless, staring down at an empty nest. After about two minutes he turned away and, with the movement of an old man, climbed down, walked a few steps, then lay, wide eyes staring ahead. The nest was one which he and Flo had shared a short while before Flo died…In the presence of his big brother Figan, Flint had seemed to shake off a little of his depression. But then he suddenly left the group and raced back to the place where Flo had died and there sank into ever deeper depression…Flint became increasingly lethargic, refused food and, with his immune system thus weakened, fell sick. 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 Flo’s body had lain. There he stayed for several hours, sometimes staring and staring into the water. He struggled on a little further, then curled up–and never moved again.”
Elephants are also animals with a well known mourning ritual. The blog reports that even magpies have been known to mark the death of one of theirs.
It is hard to know why the animals are doing what they’re doing in the picture above. Are they lined up to view what maybe a novel situation i.e. one in which a chimp is wheeled away when dead as opposed to what happens in the real world ? Remember what Marc Hauser said about how hard it is for us to decipher what is going on inside an animal’s head.
The picture was taken by Monica Szczupider and first reported in National Geographic Magazine.
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