Baboon mother at Copenhagen Zoo takes care of dead young: Can animals feel grief?

Recently, Danish TV 2 reported a feature about a mother baboon from Copenhagen Zoo who had been holding her deceased young for ten days.

One of the journalists happened to be at the zoo with his family. They spotted what they thought looked like a lifeless baby baboon.

And they were right, says Mads Frost Bertelsen, zoological director at Copenhagen Zoo and professor at the University of Copenhagen.

In another video, the mother baboon pushes away another cub that gets too close to the dead one.

According to Mads Frost Bertelsen, it is not unusual for certain primates to hold on to deceased young. Primates are different species of monkeys, such as chimpanzees, but also humans.

The eternal question

Is it an expression that animals can feel grief? The researchers are unsure about that.

Among other things, it is known that Asian elephants behave differently when they are near other deceased elephants. They touch the dead with their trunks, and at other times they roar.

The researchers have described how other elephants “stand watch” over the dead.

Jens Malmkvist, senior researcher at Aarhus University, has stated that they could not rule out that elephants feel grief, but that the research they were shown did not say anything about it either.

– When a behavioral change occurs in elephants, we do not know whether it is because they are just curious, wondering, or whether it is pure instinct. Or if it is actually because their emotional world is also affected in a way that we can call grief.

Also when the killer whale Tahlequah lost her young and then swam a “mourning trip” for 17 days, it was questioned whether the killer whale experienced grief over the loss.

At the time, Sussie Pagh, senior researcher at the Department of Chemistry and Biosciences at Aarhus University, stated the same, that we cannot say anything scientifically about animals feeling grief.

– Because we cannot see into their brains. But we can talk to people, and they can tell us about their grief.

– When it comes to animals, we can only observe and interpret their behaviour, so we are at the limit of what natural science can accommodate.

In 2016, a reader wrote to Videnskab.dk and asked if animals are capable of feeling grief.

Henrik Høgh-Olesen, professor of psychology at Aarhus University, was not completely dismissive. He has previously explained that prairie voles can empathize and comfort each other when they are in pain.

– Chimpanzees and bonobos look like they are grieving. They can become passive and paralyzed, and their moods change when conspecifics die. They can also carry them around and stay with them.

The other reasons

Although Mads Frost Bertelsen from Copenhagen Zoo has also seen elephants and primates showing what looks like grief, the zoo director is careful not to put such a label on it.

He himself believes that there may be other reasons for the behaviour.

– We see that many animal mothers look briefly at their dead young and move on. But when it comes to pack-living primates, we see that they carry around their dead young for a longer period of time, he explains.

Although we don’t know for sure why some primates carry around their dead young, he has a hypothesis, according to Bertelsen.

Carrying around dead young is not a behavior seen in primates living in monogamous relationships, such as marmosets.

But for primates who live in social family herds, where it is usually a male who fertilizes the females, it is different.

Here the mothers can carry their deceased offspring for a long time.

– My thesis is that it is a social phenomenon. Having children gives you a higher social status in a group, he says.

– Even a dead cub shows that you are one of those people who can have children.

If it was grief that the primates experienced, Bertelsen believes that it would be just as natural for monogamous primates to display this behaviour.

– I would not say that this is definitely the case. It is only a hypothesis, he emphasizes.

A chimpanzee and a baby elephant

Although many animals experience their young dying in the wild, the story is different at Copenhagen Zoo.

Here the mortality rate is significantly lower.

But when a baby animal dies, the staff notices that the animals behave differently.

And there are harsh scenes the zoo director describes:

– Our experience is that when very young baby elephants die, the other elephants stand around them and beat and beat them. And the social primates carry their young around, explains Bertelsen. He emphasizes that this is not normal behaviour.

Bertelsen particularly remembers an incident six years ago where a stillborn cub was beaten, trampled on and thrown around among the other elephants.

– It was a very violent reaction, but perhaps it is a natural stimulation of the newborn to breathe and get on its feet that just got out of hand because the stillborn child did not react, he says.

– It doesn’t seem like sadness so much as it seems like frustration. They probably thought that the stillborn baby elephant was not doing what newborns usually do.

In the same way, Bertelsen tells of a chimpanzee who walked around with her dead cub for so long that it eventually dried up completely.

– It had become so old and dry that it became quite goofy, he explains.

No unpleasant surprises

PS: If you are going to Copenhagen Zoo with your family and are worried about suddenly bumping into a dead baby baboon, you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Copenhagen Zoo will inform you in advance.

– We want to inform the parents so that they can inform their children, explains Bertelsen.