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A Baboon’s Life
Why are the prime-age males so aggressive to the deposed ruling class? Are they
afraid that the old guys may rise again? Do they get an ugly thrill from getting
away with it? It is impossible, of course, to say what is going on in their
heads. My studies indicate, though, that the new generation doesn’t much care who
the aged animal is, so long as he was once high ranking.
With assistant Hudson Oyaro at a campsite on the river’s edge
One might expect what goes around to come around, that males who were
particularly brutal in their prime should be the ones most subject to
indignities. But I did not observe this pattern. The brutalizing of elderly males
who remained in the troop was independent of how aggressively they had behaved in
their heyday. All that seemed to matter was that they had once been dominant and
that they no longer were.
Even against this grim backdrop, more than half of aging males did not leave
their bands. Instead, they finished their lives in the troops where they suffered
this mistreatment. My data suggest that they were sustained through their later
years by simple friendship friendship offered not by other males, but by
females in the troop.
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