Jane Goodall On the Murderers in the Woods

Jane Goodall has died, and the world is poorer without her in it.

Goodall was an observer.  That alone makes her too rare — someone who actually spent thousands of hours in forest, field, and jungle observing wild and domestic animals and taking meticulous notes on their behavior.

With her feet planted in the dirt, she stood her ground when presented with nonsense, even when that nonsense was presented by someone she had worked with, and co-authored a book with, in the past.

In 2013, Jane Goodall wrote in The Wall Street Journal that murder in the woods was pretty common, no matter how uncomfortable that might make French philosophers and social commentators writing beyond their knowledge base.

“Where does human savagery come from?” she asked, noting that “animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff, writing in Psychology Today after last month's awful events in Newtown, Conn., echoed a common view: It can't possibly come from nature or evolution. Harsh aggression, he wrote, is ‘extremely rare’ in nonhuman animals, while violence is merely an odd feature of our own species, produced by a few wicked people. If only we could ‘rewild our hearts,’ he concluded, we might harness our ‘inborn goodness and optimism’ and thereby return to our ‘nice, kind, compassionate, empathic’ original selves.

Goodall was not saluting any of it.

“If only if it were that simple,” she wrote. 

“A 2006 paper reviewed evidence from five separate chimpanzee populations in Africa, groups that have all been scientifically monitored for many years. The average ‘conservatively estimated risk of violent death’ was 271 per 100,000 individuals per year. If that seems like a low rate, consider that a chimpanzee's social circle is limited to about 50 friends and close acquaintances. This means that chimpanzees can expect a member of their circle to be murdered once every seven years. Such a rate of violence would be intolerable in human society.

“...[C]himpanzees and humans are not the only species that form coalitions for killing. Other animals that use this strategy to kill their own species include group-living carnivores such as lions, spotted hyenas and wolves. The resulting mortality rate can be high: Among wolves, up to 40% of adults die from attacks by other packs.”

Whoops!   

Beckoff, who had coauthord “The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for Animals We Love” with Goodall was called our rather publically about the notion that social pack predators are not commonly violent within their own species and even within their own family circles.

To Marc Bekoff’s credit, he listened and, only a few years later, helped put to bed the nonsense assertion that there is no dominance in the world of wild wolves.  

In fact, as wolf biologist David Mech has noted — correcting those who have never actually taken the time to read his work — dominance shapes almost every facet of wolf pack dynamics.  

For more on that, see “Oops. There Really IS Dominance in Wolves”.

For the record, I don’t think wolf behavior has much to do with dog training, but for those who want to argue the matter, one way or another, at least read the papers of those who have taken the time to observe.

A very good final lesson from Dr. Jane Goodall.