Before June of last year I didn't particularly like baboons. They seemed to be aggressive, ill-tempered monkeys that more often provoked a small sense of revulsion in me than curiosity. (In fact, for most of my life I thought primates were pretty boring; didn't they just sit around eating leaves and picking ticks off each other?) Then I happened to pick up Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir and that all changed. There was so much I didn't know about them and by the time I put down Sapolsky's book I had an interest and affection for them that I could not have predicted.
Coincidentally I would take an introductory primatology course with Ryne Palombit, who presently studies baboons in Botswana, a few months later. The course further drew me into the ins and outs of baboon society, and I have to admit that by the end of the term I wished I too had plans to study baboons in Africa. The release of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth's Baboon Metaphysics was enough to keep my curiosity sated over winter break, and being that I have just picked up a replacement copy of Shirley Strum's Almost Human I once again have baboons on the brain.
If I have any regret it is that I did not overcome my primate prejudices earlier. I guess it was always easier to see them as just another kind of animal, not much different from any other beast behind glass at the zoo. Reading the work of people who have spent years in the field with them and seeing the gorillas face-to-face at the Bronx zoo certainly changed all that, though, and I certainly think I am the better for it. As Darwin once wrote in a notebook, "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke," and I certainly think that knowing our relatives helps to untangle some of the questions about the monkey in the mirror.
Further reading (and listening);
"How Baboons Think (Yes, Think)" - New York Times
- Log in to post comments
Bottom links excellent, thanks Brian.
As a graduate student, I did some experiments which involved baboons. For me, they were foul-tempered animals. Of course, I guess I can't blame them. I'd be foul-tempered too if I spent all day locked up in a cage.
Having just recently come back from Kenya, I was interested to witness there the "alliance" between yellow baboons and Thompson's gazelles. The gazelles have fantastic hearing and sense of smell; the baboons can climb trees and have (apparently) very good eyesight. They pal around together to help each other keep watch for predators, and both groups benefit. What interests me most about this was that I was aware from reading that baboons have been known to eat gazelle babies if they catch them when they are small enough; however, given that the gazelles were showing no wariness around the baboons at all, and there were a number of babies in the group (it being that season and all), obviously the baboons weren't even making a try at that. An elementary consideration of relative benefit -- short-term meat vs. long-term protection from predators?
Having said that, the olive baboons which kept invading our camp were f***ing scary and I didn't like them at all.
I picked up Eugene Marais' Soul of the Ape some years back. Dated to be sure, (and mistitled of course at least in English) but also very forward thinking in many ways. I think Marais' baboon work really set the bar for all students of primate sociology especially those with an ethological bent...