Next time you’re pontificating with your cigarette while talking trash about the Man, remember you’re not the only one being held down by the authorities. It turns out chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives, have to deal with police too. One question though: With studies saying that chimpanzee feces-throwing is a sign of intelligence, what kind of behavior does it take to get a chimp cop called?A new report on chimpanzee behavior, led by Prof. Carel van Schaik and Claudia Rudolf von Rohr at the University of Zurich, says that the ‘policing’ behavior is aimed at resolving disputes between individuals before they escalate into a full-fledged brawl.Van Schaik said that, when a chimp dispute looks like it might get nasty, a third party will step into to break it up. In an email, she said that the interventions are meant to avoid “mostly serious (escalated) conflicts, or what you might call a real fight. Those are also the conflicts that could end up drawing in many others.” Limiting battle royales is aimed at keeping a group’s cohesion. Von Schaik said that keeping peace is “better fro everyone. One can show that more peaceful groups have higher rates of reproduction and survival.”The researchers found that is was mostly high-ranking individuals taking on policing duties, and that their interventions were rare. Van Schaik said that high-ranking individuals were the most common police because they tend to be more powerful than the quarrelers. However, the likelihood that a cop — it’s actually more of a mediator’s role — might step in increased if there were more chimpanzees getting in on the fight. Van Schaik said that her team honed in on true mediators, who tried to break up fights without any monkey business.“We have focused on those actions that consisted of peaceful interventions to avoid including cases where the intervener might have some political axe to grind,” she said. “So, we studied cases where all the intervener does is physically stop the conflict by going in between the contestants and thus making it difficult to attack each other.”However, it’s not all peaceful on chimpanzees’ mean streets. It seems that, despite supposedly being impartial arbitrators, some of the police chimps can let their power go to their heads, or let political connections influence them, or otherwise find themselves enjoying some police brutality.“There are also violent interventions, but basically those are described under the header of coalitions,” Van Schaik said. “Then, you can’t tell whether the intervener wants to help someone, hurt the other party, or simply wants to stop the fight by attacking the attacker.”With that in mind, I asked her how the chimpanzees respond to the policing and how they compare to humans to see if there’s some sort of “fuck da police” contingent in the chimp world.“It’s hard to say,” Van Schaik said. “But remember, our interveners (arbitrators) did not take sides. If they take sides, there might be more risk of animosity, but the arbitrators tend to be very high-ranking animals with high authority in the group.”If you thought that all kind of sounds like humans, you’re a smart cookie: The conclusion that the paper draws is that if chimpanzees display such morally-motivated behavior — moral in that it’s aimed at keeping peace within the group, rather than worrying about getting fed or laid — it must be a trait that evolved before we did. In other words, the fact that chimpanzees display policing behavior suggests that at least one of our animal ancestors has at least a base concept of morality. Which, considering how peacefully some of the chimp disputes are resolved, begs the obvious conclusion: Perhaps we aren’t so highly evolved after all.Artwork by the author. Follow Derek Mead on Twitter.
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