I watched a documentary a while ago narrated by David Attenborough. It was sooooooo beautiful it had me crying my eyes out! It was almost Shakespearean with the amount of tragedy and heartbreak. It was obvs real, but could've easily been one of the finest works of Shakespeare. Very emotional
Basically, what happened is there was this alpha who was getting older and was frequently challenged by a younger chimp. The alpha put the young chimp in his place several times. And so the young chimp would gather support and allies from other younger chimps in the community in order to overthrow the alpha and his friends.
Eventually the alpha grew older and lost a lot of his strength. His younger challenger beat him I combat and as the old alpha was mortally wounded and dying one of his friends was stroking his head and comforting him until the moment he passed away and then you could see the pain he suffered as a result. There was something very beautiful about that, something very human. It was very touching.
Once the new alpha had established his position he decided to take whichever females he wanted, roughly raping them and treating them horrendously. So much so that the female chimps all ganged up on him and subdued him, which resulted in this particular community of chimps becoming like a matriarchy with the new alpha kind of becoming excommunicated.
All of their interactions and behaviours reminded me of simplistic versions of human behaviours and reinforced the idea in my mind that we are just animals with similar desires and behaviours exhibited by chimps. There is something very human in their behaviours.
They are capable of barbaric acts, as we are. Also they are capable of great acts of compassion, as we are. It's strikingly clear that even though we are more evolved and capable of greater forms of expression such as theatre and the arts, we are still animals on God's planet. We have more commonalities with these animals than we think or would care to admit...
