A coalition of lethal aggression is something that is pervasive in human animal society, but not in nonhuman animal societies. But primatologists and anthropologists have recorded the largest sample of lethal coalitionary aggression do occur in chimpanzees.
An attack was carried out by resident male chimpanzees on a former alpha male who returned to the community after being expelled, ostracized and banned. The West African chimpanzee named Foudouko was beaten with rocks and sticks, and then stomped on and cannibalized by his former community.
The event was studied and published in the International Journal of Primatology, after Iowa State University Biological Anthropologist Jill Pruetz had been studying this particular group of chimps since 2001.
This is one of nine recorded cases where chimpanzees killed one of their own, as opposed to killing a chimpanzee from another tribe. This shows a basic understanding of essential parts of our lives, and of many other nonhuman animal lives, which is that of cooperation and conflict.
Normally there are more adult females than males, but in this case there were almost to males for every female which intensifies competition for reproduction. I have previously posted about the intra-sexual competition in primate societies. Jill says this is a likely result of human influence from San Miguel poachers putting female chimpanzees and taking their infants for the pet trade.
Why did this happen?
Foudouko had gained alpha male status as a teenager and ruled with his right-hand "man" Mamadou, the beta male. Foudouko was a tyrant, and lost his favor as a powerful leader when Mamadou was injured and Foudouko maintained an alliance with the weaker friend. As a result, Foudouko was ostracized and outed from the community and lived on the outskirts of chimp society for years. The researchers who studied the chimp communities only saw him once or twice a year in the fields.
I suspect engendering a "respect", loyalty and fear based on tyrannical power domination and establishing that as the norm in their society, resulted in a lack of continued demonstration of that alpha male dominance when he continued to ally himself with the weaker chimp. The group mind didn't tolerate acts of kindness given the opposite was how they expected him to act in their current way of life. Foudouko was breaking the "rules" of their way of life.
Mamadou later recovered his beta status in 2013, and his brother David became the alpha male of the group. They both accepted Foudouko back, despite other in the community still chasing after him from time to time. I suppose they still didn't like the one they rejected who didn't live up to the standard and expectations they had of him. These primates had expectations of a dominant alpha being such, and when he chose not be like, they all threw him out, and still didn't accept him back years later.
Now when he returned and tried to establish a position in the hierarchy of power again, five other young males didn't like that. Pruetz says: “He was trying to come back in at a high rank, which was ultimately a foolish thing to do on his part.”
That was the beginning of the end for Foudouko. One dark morning the research team heard loud screams and hoots from the nearby champs slickness. When the sun broke out, they found Foudouko dead and bleeding, with a bite to his right foot, a large gash in his back and a ripped penis. I will spare you the pictures they took.
Researchers also found that he had cracked ribs and wounds on his fingers likely from the other chimps holding his hands in the teeth: down during the attack. After the attack the abuse continued, where they threw rocks and poked him with sticks, biting his limbs and eating some of the flesh.
“It was striking. The female that cannibalised the body the most, she’s the mother of the top two high-ranking males. Her sons were the only ones that really didn’t attack the body aggressively."
Foudouko's old friend, Mamadou, did not partake int he attack, and even tried to wake him up as if he wasn't dead.
“Do chimpanzees understand death? It’s not clear if they do," says another primatologist. They aren't checking the pulser breath to determine if life persists, and they keep being a body even after it's been killed. The observed cannibalism was unusual though.
As a result of Mamadou's allegiance to his old friend, I suspect this showed weakness to the favored condition of alpha male dominance and power which resulted in his own expulsion from the group by the same young males who attacked Foudouko. They seem to be carrying on the same behavior to Mamadou that they express towards Foudouko.
In my understanding, this demonstrates that the conditioning into normalization or standardized acceptability will enforce a persistence of that current condition. In the case of a community that seems to favor and respect alpha male dominance and power (which is often exemplified through violence), a departure from that normalized standard of acceptability results in an automated conditioned response to attempt to uphold that power structure as a way of life, where even the leaders are taken down and replaced if they fail to measure up to that idea.
As I have said many times, there is great power and consciousness to do good or evil. Human animals with higher order consciousness than other nonhuman animals have the capacity to understand and define models to reference behavior, such as morality. We have the capacity to do even greater evil than the other nonhuman animals, but we also have a higher order capacity of consciousness to recognize what our behavior does and stop engaging in immoral or evil actions. Lower order consciousness animals are more easily swept away by their conditioning and subconscious instincts and motivations.
We can learn to do good or evil. Being conditioned into a certain way of life will tend to promote a continuation of that current that flows and creates the river of society.
Many of us in the world are perpetuating evil and immoral ways without even being aware of it because we are not engaging in higher order consciousness capacities to understand more about ourselves. We lack knowledge of ourselves, self-knowledge. We learn something, learn to do something a certain way, learn to live a certain way, and we tend to just go with the flow and maintain that current condition.
Those who go against that current condition, such as those who try to speak truth to the falsity of the current condition, are conflicting with that falsity and will engender a cooperation on the part of those who are attached to that falsity and seek to maintain its existence as the current condition and way of life. This not only applies to human animals, but other animals as well, in my psychological understanding of different degrees and capacities of consciousness and psychological existence.
References:
- Chimps beat up, murder and then cannibalise their former tyrant
- Intragroup Lethal Aggression in West African Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus): Inferred Killing of a Former Alpha Male at Fongoli, Senegal
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