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Status is important to both sexes, but among the males it seems to matter as much as food, perhaps more than sex. The struggle to achieve it calls forth prodigies of creative imagination. Mike, a low-ranking male of unremarkable physique, seized supreme power in his group by a stroke of genius. He grabbed a couple of empty kerosene cans from the author's camp and then charged at the other males, bellowing ferociously and banging the cans together as he came. Appalled by the din, his rivals fled. Swaggering absurdly, Mike challenged Goliath, the dominant male, and in a drama of display and roaring counterdisplay he broke the older male's nerve. After that, whenever the two met, they rushed up to each other like a couple of rival jocks and worked off their anxiety by hugging, slapping, grooming—and kissing each other on the neck. "Never, however," the author reassures us, "have we seen anything that could be regarded as homosexuality in chimpanzees."
On the whole, in fact, sex was the least serious problem in a chimpanzee's relations. Total promiscuity was the rule, but now and then a male developed a platonic passion for a special female and followed her everywhere, whether or not she was in heat. Sometimes his feeling was returned, and in that case something like a chimpanzee marriage was made. At times sexual fidelity was a part of the contract. At the other extreme, one of the dominant males would sometimes try to assemble a harem. At the first opportunity, the females usually flew the coop.
A Model Mother. Most females were more interested in children than they were in males. Jane found that chimp mothers who made their babies get out on their own at an early age wound up with clinging, frightened children. Steady, loving and even indulgent mothers, in contrast, generally had happy, independent offspring. Flo, a perfectly hideous old chimp who for reasons beyond human imagination made all the males go ape at mating season, was a model mother when the study began. She played with her babies continually, picked them up at the first whimper, followed every slap with a squeeze and cleverly distracted her child when she saw misbehavior in the making; but as she grew older she became grandmotherly and spoiled one little chimp rotten. As he approached maturity, he was still a screaming ninny.
Unlike Sunday Darwins like Robert Ardrey (African Genesis), Jane van Lawick-Goodall does not press the homosimian parallels or insist that psychocosmic mysteries can be solved by watching a bunch of monkeys in a tree. Yet the parallels are strong, and so is the reader's temptation to see in the chimpanzee a hairy mirror of mankind. A woman as well as a scientist, Jane loves her subjects and makes the reader love them too—not as clever pets but as serious and struggling individuals. All the more painful, then, to be told that throughout Africa chimpanzees are being shot for the pot by natives and pursued by professional hunters who knock off the mothers and ship the babies to zoos and laboratories. To one who has read this book, the fact that people kill chimpanzees seems only slightly less sickening than the fact that people kill people.