Chimps are f#$%ing terrifying

I wrote and edited this together at the end of this past March, but I thought that I'd share it here.

One of the communities of chimpanzees that Jane Goodall made famous was the Kasakela community in Tanzania. It was there that she met this particular chimp...

Dawwwwwww.

Meet Frodo. He looks unassuming enough, right? There with his leaves and his fur and his, OH don't you just want to put him in people clothes and make him do people things? He's just like any of us, but so graceful and gentle.

Well fucking wrong you are, he's worse than most of us. Frodo was famous for asserting himself as the alpha male over the rest of the community. He did this through raw aggression and intimidation. He famously thrashed Jane Goodall, almost breaking her neck, and beat up cartoonist Gary Larson. He was the Sulla of chimpdom. So why is he worse than us? This is shit that humans do every day, but even Sulla, one of the chief butcher dictators of the late Roman republic, didn't do what Frodo is most infamous for...

It's common for chimps to wrest newborns from other chimps and kill them for fresh meat as a display of dominance, but a Tanzanian park worker had no idea how bad that can get. Frodo was eating some leaves near a footpath that the woman was walking, on her way to the research camp. She had her 14 month old child with her, and she was scared shitless when she crossed paths with Frodo.

Obey.

He was aggressive, she understood that, but she didn't expect what Frodo did next: he went up to her, wrenched the baby from her arms, disappeared into the forest and proceeded to eat the baby.

Holy shit. Not even Hitler ate babies. This reaches a low that not even the the man considered to be the most evil thing in human history can claim, "Ja. Been there, done that." So maybe we should be thankful that the chimpanzee is a lower life form, although if apes come any further on the technological scale...they are starting to figure out spears and how to kill things with them.

With my spear and magic helmet!

I was also surprised while I was researching this to read about the surprisingly complex politics that went on in Kasakela. In 2002 Frodo fell ill, and a coalition of several other male chimps in the community deposed him. After recovering from his infection, he was unable to reassert his alpha male status.

The cheese stands alone.

So the next time you start to feel superior to other life forms, keep running with it! If you start to sympathize with the chimps and bring them up to our level, they might just eat your newborn baby.