Chimp police break up fights: Swiss study

[xchrom]

http://www.thelocal.ch/2787/20120309/


Photo credit: Claudia Rudolf von Rohr

Researchers at Walter Zoo in Gossau have found that chimpanzees will mediate disputes amongst peers in an effort to keep harmony in the group.

Anthropologists from the University of Zurich, led by Professor Carel van Schaik and Claudia Rudolf von Rohr, studied a group of chimps at the zoo for almost 600 hours across two years, and consulted records of chimp activity from three other zoos, news website the Huffington Post reported.

They found that certain impartial chimps would intervene in conflicts between fighting group members. The policing chimps showed neither bias to one or other side, nor any aggression.

“We were lucky enough to be able to observe a group of chimpanzees into which new females had recently been introduced and in which the ranking of the males was also being redefined,” Claudia Rudolf von Rohr, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. An interesting tidbit from the article ...

[quote]They found that certain impartial chimps would intervene in conflicts between fighting group members. The policing chimps showed neither bias to one or other side, nor any aggression. [/quote]

So did chimps figure out that they don't need to use force to keep the peace; or did man forget, evolve out of that notion, or just never know?

[Gore1FL]

2. Every human clique has a peacemaker. n/t

[Silent3]

3. Often enough chimps succeed in hurting and even killing one another

Whatever "policing" they have is far from 100% effective at always keeping the peace.

[1StrongBlackMan]

5. You've missed my point ...

I know there are killings within the chimp community; but, from the article, it doesn't seem to be the peace-keepers doing the killing, or even using force to enforce a peace, as with the human community.

[Silent3]

6. What I gathered from your post was that you thought the chimps' lack of use of force...

...was something humans should learn from and emulate. Since their policing is less than completely effective, however, then there's no clear lesson to be learned from the chimps.

Human policing done with use of force isn't completely effective either, of course. Nothing in this one study of chimp behavior, however, provides a good reason to believe that, say, unilaterally disarming of all human police forces would produce a clearly beneficial outcome.

The study does, of course, provide fuel for the old aren't-humans-so-terrible-and-nature-so-wise narrative many people seem to love, but that's very different from providing sufficient data to inform human policy decisions on the operation of police forces.

[HopeHoops]

4. Someone needs to Photoshop the pepper-spray cop into that picture.