Violent Chimpanzees That Attack Villages and Steal Children | Our World

There is an animal more like us than we ever imagined. Chimpanzees are predators. They hunt because they like meat. An animal with a deadly side. They hunt anything that's small enough to get. They chew the hands and the feet and the guts first. An animal that attacks its own kind. They would hold him or grab him, bite him, hit him, stomp on him. An animal whose dark side we seem to share. It was like watching a murderer. In the heart of Equatorial Africa, a series of bizarre killings is being investigated. No one, not even the village elders, can recall a case quite like it. The chief suspect is not a person, but a chimpanzee. In pursuit of the killer is Kateba Adeo, ex-tracker at the local chimpanzee research project, now Africa's number one chimp detective. The setting for the drama is a patchwork of fields, forests and tea plantations. Welcome to Uganda and the green hills of Rutete County. Squeezed between the Congo and Kenya, Uganda is home to some 26 million people and several thousand chimpanzees, two competing species. In the west of the country, where the human population is growing fastest, a conflict has flared. The past seven years have seen 15 attacks by chimps on young children, over half of them fatal. As we follow this unprecedented trail of attacks, we'll discover that chimpanzees have a dark side that few of us could have imagined. It's a dark side that will shake us, not just because we are its victims, but because it will confront us with a truth about ourselves. The very idea that chimps are killers seems contrary to almost everything we've learned about them. For over 40 years, our observations of wild chimpanzees have revealed an animal of singular sophistication. Look into a chimp's eyes and an intelligent mind gazes back. An animal with thoughts, feelings and a personality. Their bonds of friendship can last 50 years or more. Chimps even have the beginnings of culture. They pick up and pass on the skills of their own particular group. Some scientists suspect that chimpanzees actually have a sense of wonder. We shouldn't be too surprised. Chimpanzees are our nearest living relatives, more closely allied to us even than they are to gorillas. Around 99% of their DNA is still identical to ours. But of course, few of us will ever see them in the wild. Our impressions of chimpanzees are formed much closer to home. And it's their lighter side that has always charmed the crowds. With the youngsters, it's all fun and games. But as they grow older, a darker side can emerge. On the 11th of April 1994, at a zoo in England, volunteer keeper Angelique Todd set out to feed the chimps. Among them was Busta, an adult male. I knew this chimp for three years. I had quite a good relationship with him. Male chimpanzees in captivity in general, you have to be careful with them. They're one of the most dangerous animals in a zoo. They can be very aggressive and very feisty. So you always are cautious. Though alone, Angelique felt safe. She'd worked here for several years and knew the routine. What she didn't know was that today, Busta was in a dangerous mood. A small gap under his cage would give him just enough room to strike. He saw his opportunity and he took it. These kind of events, you go in slow motion, you're in shock, you're trying to survive. First of all, I thought I could take off my coat and he could just get my coat. Then I tried obviously pulling my arm back and there was no point in doing that whatsoever. I couldn't provide any resistance. He was just so strong. It was pure survival. I was watching myself being eaten alive. The first thing that happened was he bit my thumb off, practically almost down to the first joint. Then my index finger and then he was just working himself up my arm. Obviously all my arteries were severed. I lost a huge amount of muscle mass, almost all of it in fact. I still have tooth wounds on either side of my arm, but this is much, much improved. What was Busta playing at? I think what he wanted to do was just get hold of me. I think initially it was just, I can get hold of her, I can see a hole, there's a way that I can grab her. And that's what his initial reaction was. After he bit my thumb off and obviously all the blood started spurting out, then it became kind of like a feeding frenzy. I continued working at the zoo a little while after my accident also. It was felt that it was very important for me to go and see this chimp for counselling reasons. When I went back, he couldn't look at me in the face. He just had his head on the ground all the time. And whether one interprets that as remorse or that he knows that he did a bad thing, I don't know. Chimps like Busta have long since outgrown their playful charm. By the time they're 15 or 20 years old, they're three or four times as strong as the strongest man and capable of tremendous violence. Harvard zoologist Professor Richard Wrangham has been studying chimpanzees in the wild for over 30 years and knows better than most the Jekyll and Hyde nature of these complex creatures. At one extreme of this contradictory nature is something he finds utterly compelling. An extraordinary capacity for violence. Wrangham's research project is in western Uganda, in Kibale National Park. It's prime chimp habitat. Dense rainforest right up to the boundary. Outside the park lie the fields and villages of Roteti County, home of our chimp detective, Kete Badeo, and his growing homicide investigation. With chimps and people coming into contact more often, Wrangham's concerns have spread beyond his own research. You get sightings in the village areas, sometimes several a week, of chimpanzees. Sometimes in a month, the chimpanzees encounter children at close quarters, within five or ten meters, half a dozen times. Along with a Ugandan colleague, Wrangham's research student, Mike Wilson, visited a local school to teach the kids about chimps. He was surprised, though, by what the kids told them. We asked the schoolchildren what they knew about chimpanzees and one of them said, oh, well, they attack people. They kill children. And the donor said, ah, have you seen this? Have you ever seen a chimpanzee attack someone? How many in this room have seen a chimpanzee attack someone? And they all raised their hands. A week later, they were proved right. Less than a mile away, a baby was seized and mauled. Another casualty in a string of attacks on village children. It had all begun two and a half years earlier, when a similar attack proved fatal. The year was 1995. When we first had the reports of the killings, there was an alarm, both among the villagers and among ourselves, that this might be the chimps that we were working with. I hired one of my field assistants, Kateba Deo, to move out into that area, which is actually where he lives, and to spend his days moving around, talking to people, finding out where the chimpanzee was. So it was that Kateba Deo became a one-man detective agency. His beat was a 10-mile stretch of villages and plantations running along the west side of Kibale National Park, Uganda. The case was a clear-cut homicide, and his prime suspect was an adult male chimp, identity unknown. Deo's mission was simple, find the killer. Researchers had already given the animal a name, Saddam. Who was this chimp, and why was he attacking children? As he set about gathering intelligence, Deo found himself besieged by villagers. It wasn't just children who'd been chased. Chickens, dogs, and even goats had also been attacked. The essential problem for a Saddam, these males, is that they are coming into contact with humans at an incredibly high rate. At first, no one knew if these attacks really were due to a single chimp. But as the cases multiplied, one thing did become clear. Sightings and encounters were centred on a handful of villages up to four miles outside the park. It was a pattern that meant Rangam's chimps, back in the forest, were off the suspect list. Deo's enquiries were leading him instead to a small group of so-called village chimps. Few in number, these chimps still live in the odd patches of forest left outside the park, surviving on a mixture of wild foods and whatever they can raid from the surrounding fields. They often would go to where people were making a beer from bananas, and these banana boats, as they call them, where you get a pile of bananas, leads to a terrific food resource for chimpanzees. They also get drunk, and actually, the drunkenness might contribute a little bit to some of the attacks that have been seen. Kete, Deo got some good beer out of it. The search was becoming more focused. With the park chimps off the hook, the village chimps were in the dock. And with more information, the case was beginning to stack up. By early 1997, on the basis of eyewitness descriptions, footprints and the concentration of attacks, Deo was confident that he was dealing with a single chimp. Saddam's profile was slowly sketching itself. He was large, probably in his late 20s, and usually moved alone. But the reason for his attacks was far less clear. Was he a one-off, deranged in some way? Maybe he was injured and unable to feed normally. Or was the truth more chillingly simple? Could it be that chickens, goats and children were just easy prey? To find clues, we must leave the villages and head back to the forests. What is natural chimp behaviour? Given the choice, what do chimpanzees normally eat? When scientists first tracked them in the wild, the basics of their diet were plain to see. Ripe, sugary fruits, often finished off with a salad of young leaves. Lucky finds, like a log full of honey, make a tasty addition to the menu. A treat to be savoured. When it comes to protein, some groups of chimps have learned how to fish for termites. But there's also another, much meatier source of protein that all chimps seem to relish. It's got to be pretty terrifying for a group of monkeys to see a group of chimps show up beneath them and sort of look up and get all excited and go after them. Ian Gilbey has just spent four summers studying the hunting behaviour of wild chimpanzees. He's impressed with the risks they take to get fresh meat. The monkeys are really quite formidable. They have big canines, and an adult male colobus monkey can weigh up to 12 kilos. So they're quite a serious adversary. The male monkeys try pretty valiantly to defend their group against the chimps. It's not just the monkeys' teeth the chimps have to watch for. It's a very risky thing in terms of risk of falling. The monkeys are obviously much smaller than the chimps are, and so they're bounding around up in the little branches in the tops of the trees, and the chimps are trying to go after them. So sometimes branches break, and they try to make a jump that they can't do, and they can quite easily get injured. To the untrained eye, it looks like chaos. But there's method in all this madness. The chimpanzees seem to be targeting the babies and the juveniles. The younger ones, the meat is more tender, or they're easier to catch. But they do tend to prefer them. They often ignore the males, or try to throw the males out of the way, or hit them out of the way, and get up to the infants and the juveniles. The hunter will grab a monkey, and usually will immediately drop down out of the trees to avoid being mobbed and attacked by the monkeys. And the aftermath of a hunt is often very chaotic. There's a lot of screaming, there's lots of display that's very loud. It's pretty exciting to watch. Sometimes, you know, the carcass gets torn in two. And then after a while, it does settle down, and you'll start having these little begging clusters. When the hunt is over, the meat fest can begin. Pride plays no part for the empty-handed chimps. They're on the scrounge. Begging ranges from just sitting and staring at the carcass, to actually pulling on it, to actually putting their hands over the possessor's mouth. And so you can see him sort of moving away, turning all the time, and eventually giving up what he's got, just so that he doesn't have to keep on doing that. Scientists have long debated why chimps are such avid hunters. To Ian, it's very simple. They hunt because they like meat. A large group of chimps can consume up to a tonne of monkey in a year. That's a tenth of the colobus population. Chimps eat more meat than any other primate, except for humans. The forest provides plenty of fresh meat for the red-blooded chimps, but cut down the trees and their wild prey disappears. Back in western Uganda, in Rutete County, one consequence of deforestation was becoming all too clear. By May 1997, Saddam, the killer chimp, had struck several times. Details of his attacks were now piecing together. The pattern looks very much like hunting, because what the males are doing is grabbing an infant, just immobilising them and taking them away. And they're immediately eating them, and they eat them in the style in which they eat monkeys. They chew the hands and the feet and the guts first. Saddam's attacks were getting bolder. The presence of women and older children was no longer a deterrent, and he was moving further from the forest in search of victims. I was 10 years old when it happened. The chimp came from the forest. My sister was inside the house. My mother was sleeping. She was ill. The chimp put his hand inside the house and took my sister. I saw the chimp dragging my sister into the forest. I shouted and the people came running with sticks and spears. They thought the chimp had killed my sister, but they chased it away and brought my sister back. The girl's injuries bore the classic hallmarks of a chimp attack. A bite to the head and a half-chewed limb. On September 16th, 1998, Saddam struck yet again, killing a one-and-a-half-year-old girl. For the villagers of Ruteti, it was the final straw. At dawn the following day, an angry mob set off into the forest. It was the hunt for Saddam, Uganda-style. When the authorities got wind of it, they called in their own marksmen. Okwilo and Makuro worked for the wildlife service, busting poachers. Now they had orders to take out a rogue chimp. We followed the track of Saddam, chasing the dogs. It was just running up and down, running up and down. Some people could try to throw some spears at Saddam, but they missed. Saddam was making a lot of noise and the dogs were also barking at Saddam. Saddam became very tired at around 1pm. It climbed the first tree. It was shot, fell down. People surrounded Saddam. Saddam was speared by several other people and Saddam died at last. To the villagers' relief, Makuro's bullet had killed the chimp. They had hung him up, almost in a crucifixion pose. They'd splayed him up with his, tied up his arms and hundreds of people had gathered around from all over to see him. With the killer slain, Mike was keen to get his hands on the body. Had he in fact been sick or injured? What sort of a chimp was he? We cut him down from where he was hung up and took him back to the park and I did a post-mortem and weighed him. He was a big, healthy male. He must have been over 100 pounds, maybe 110 pounds. Very muscular and healthy. Has Bowens told the same story? Okay, well, here is Saddam. And the interesting thing about him, I mean, here's his skull. You see, here's where the shot went in and killed him. And he was a young male in pretty good condition. His teeth are not worn at all. They've still got all their ridges. And if you look in detail at all of his limb bones, you find no pathology at all. There's nothing that indicates he had any kind of disease. There was nothing in the post-mortem that showed he had a problem. He was just a regular guy in difficult circumstances. He'd killed four children. But is it fair to condemn him? He's almost a victim. I mean, he was in his little strip of swamp forest. He hears the sound of crying. He just walks about five paces. He finds this little brown thing lying there and squeaking. It's unprotected from his point of view. And he grabs it and takes it back again. This is just like picking up a baby piglet or grabbing a monkey from somewhere. And he eats it. Well, at that point, what he's done is he's learned that these babies are available as a source of food. It was, from the villager's point of view, a devastating discovery. Yet there was nothing unnatural about the chimp's behaviour. He was just a wild animal in the wrong kind of place. After his death, the attacks stopped. Dale's theory of the single serial killer had been right. This time. But with increasing contact between people and chimps, this, as we shall soon see, is not the end of the story. Terrible as Saddam's attacks had been, discoveries were being made only a few miles away, in the heart of Kibale National Park, which in their own way were more profoundly disturbing. Both Wrangham and other scientists working here were recording chimp attacks, not on people, but on each other. It's a sinister tale of extreme violence and of a gruesome brutality once thought to be unique to humans. It all began 30 years ago and 400 miles to the south at Gombe National Park in Tanzania. And I was there during the phase when we were discovering that territorial behaviour was a systematic part of what they did. So what I'd seen was small groups of chimps penetrating deep with complete quiet into neighbouring areas, apparently looking for opportunities to find others. I was sitting, starting to write up my thesis, and then the news comes through, and it was sort of very striking and very sort of shocking, but in some ways it made sense in terms of the behaviour we'd already seen. What observers back in Africa had just seen was a group of adult male chimps deliberately seek out and kill one of their own kind. It was a pattern of behaviour that would soon become horrifyingly familiar to scientists. They called it lethal raiding. When the early reports came out from Gombe in the 1970s, you know, when the observers first saw these things happen, they were astonished and appalled, and they thought that chimpanzees lived peacefully with their neighbours. It had been exciting to discover that chimps, just like our earliest ancestors, also ate meat. Now, scientists were faced with a more unsettling fact. Our closest living relatives didn't simply hunt monkeys, they also hunted each other. Only this wasn't killing for food. The victims weren't being eaten. It was killing for the sake of killing. Bill Wallauer, a scientist who continues the work at Gombe, has been on patrol with the chimps dozens of times. You know it's going to start when males who aren't particularly good friends within the community start grooming one another. Maybe one will sit down and kind of bristled and tense, another one comes in, and this big group of males just starts grooming one another. They may be getting into a life and death situation by going on these patrols and meeting other males from other communities. And they sit there and kind of psych themselves up. And then they set out. Single file line, very quiet. You really know you're on a patrol when that kind of radio silence is in effect. So it's a really different atmosphere. It's extraordinary. Males will stop on a ridge and look down into the home range of the next community over, even climbing trees and looking 15, 20 minutes at a time, and looking at one another, kind of trying to signal off one another whether or not they see something that might be a threat. Deep into hostile territory, and the enemy is sighted. When two big groups see each other, then all hell breaks loose. They'll pound the ground. They'll roar. They do this deep, this resonating roar. The key is you sound as big and strong as you can. The noise is impressive, but really it's just sound and fury. All gong and no dinner. With many warriors on each side, it becomes a standoff. The risk of fighting is too high and the smaller side retreats, giving ground. There's a kind of tradition in military history that you should seek at least a three to one advantage in battle before you begin. Who wants to start a fight if you don't think you're going to win it? Mike has discovered that male chimps also make a careful assessment of numbers. Before they attack, it takes three or four of them to safely kill a rival. Their ideal target is another male on his own. The only time you actually see an attack is on those rare occasions that a patrol picks off one individual by himself. In August 98, Bill saw and filmed what happens when a raiding party catches a single stranger. They'd come to a valley called Neosonga Valley and just walking very slowly, looking up in the trees and moving as if they were intent on finding someone. It was just extraordinary, just kind of one foot down and then stop and listen and then another. And I got a shot of Frodo's feet as he was going through this vegetation, just ever so lightly, stepping and then the next foot down. These patrols are extremely tense. I mean, you can almost smell the testosterone in the air. They were hunting this young male out. Eventually, the male flushed and tried to get away. When they do find somebody, all that tension is released. One of the hardest things I've ever seen in my 11 and a half years of following chimps around the forest is this attack. He was able to walk away, but when they finally did leave him, I suspect that that male wouldn't have been able to survive. It's impossible for me, for an emotional human being, not to feel so sorry for this young male, but from the chimps' point of view, they're simply defending their territory. I mean, it's what humans do all over the world and we're hearing about on the news every night. I mean, these males were simply defending their own territory from a rival and they caught a young member of that community and did what soldiers do. To this day, I carry those emotions of watching that attack and seeing the look on that chimp's face as he was caught and beaten. Deliberately seeking out and killing members of rival groups was once thought to be uniquely human behaviour. Chimpanzees, however, show us that we're not alone. They suggest that our killing ways may be embedded deep in our evolutionary past. We now know that stealthy patrols, where adult males seem to be looking for a lone victim, are characteristic of chimp groups right across Africa. In Kabale, where Rangam works, nine such lethal attacks have been recorded. In Kanyawara, we've had one of our males killed by neighbours to the south. We've had our males kill another male to the north and Ngogo, where they've got these huge groups of 25 males. Then you have, I think it's now seven kills that they've seen in the last six years. One of these attacks was witnessed and filmed by chimp researcher Professor David Watts. Several Ngogo males started to climb up this tree. The male who was up there tried to climb from there into an adjacent tree, but the top broke and he crashed to the ground, at which he tried to run off, but all the others ran off after him. By the time we got to where they'd stopped, they had caught him. He had up to 15, 20 other chimps piling on top of him or around him. They had him pretty well completely immobilised. He really was not trying to fight back. He lay there and he screamed and gave these horrible cries. He had no chance to get away. What was happening was individual males were jumping in and out. They would hold him or grab him, bite him, hit him, stomp on him, and then let go, move off a little bit, maybe give a display, even charge at another one of their fellow Ngogo males, but then come back and jump on him again. The male was still alive, but at that point, even when they did again, briefly let go, he couldn't move anymore. The last few draggings, beatings and so on happened when he seemed to be dead already, but the whole thing was over within about not much more than 10 minutes. The brutality was staggering, yet nothing out of the ordinary among chimps. Well, his genitals were torn off, which is something that chimps often go for. He had been spread-eagled and all of his wounds were on the front side. His throat was ripped out, his trachea was ripped off, the ground around him was trampled, the vegetation was all trampled, and so they'd clearly pinned him to the ground and beat him to death. No one knows how often attacks like this occur. Most killings go unseen. We have to accept that chimpanzees do things like this. And that it's not pleasant, but it's also, in a rather horrible way, it's quite fascinating. That doesn't mean I look for it or I am at all happy to see it happen, but I have to take advantage of the opportunity to try to document it. Among over 4,000 species of mammal, we know of only two where clans of kin-bonded males launch raids to kill their neighbours. If we can find out why chimps do it, we may just get a clue to why humans too are killers. As soon as you have chimps deliberately killing each other, then it's just one more way in which they're similar to humans. But of course, it's a particularly fascinating way because people have, for so long, had the sort of intense questions about why people do these appalling things to each other. And obviously, as soon as you see chimpanzees doing it, it raises the possibility that there's something sort of more deeply biological about our behaviour than people had normally been tending to think. Obviously, you're bound to start asking new questions. Could our inclination for group violence be something deep-seated that we share in common with our killing cousins? Why do outsiders, other groups, pose such a threat in the minds of both men and chimps? Why do we both have this them-and-us mentality? We identify some people as our friends and we don't want to do anything bad to them and we identify others as the enemy and we regard them almost as a different species. This may be a special feature of the emotional systems of humans and chimpanzees. In both species, it's mostly the males who cause the mayhem. And they seem to enjoy it. There's quite a lot of evidence in humans that people under the conditions of wanting to be involved in war or warlike encounters get tremendous thrill out of killing the enemies. It's certainly the way that chimpanzees look. I think it is fair to say that a kind of chimpanzee mob psychology exists. They lose their individuality in ways that have some fundamental similarity to what can happen in humans. All too easily, this dark psychology that we share with chimps can lead us to do terrible things. But is this the end of the story? It's hard to live with the notion that, as a species, we've been subject to selection for things that we revile. The joy of killing, the determination to be dominant. It's hard to accept all that stuff, but it's much more sensible to try and really expose ourselves to the awful truth about who we are and then look forward to being able to do something about it. While mankind struggles with this complex challenge, there's another problem back on the outskirts of Kibale. After two years of peace, post-Saddam, Kateba Deo has picked up the trail of a second killer. So far, it looks like all three of the latest attacks, close to Lake Kifruka, are the work of a single chimp. Known as Kiki, shorthand for Kifruka Killer, eyewitnesses describe him as very large, with a distinctive grey back. It was Wednesday morning, we went out to our field to collect potatoes. Annette had brought along her baby and her mother. Her field was close to a small patch of forest. Kiki's forest. I picked my baby up from the ground with a kanga and prepared to take him on my back. Then I looked behind and I saw a chimpanzee. So I started running. The chimpanzee was chasing me. I ran and ran, but then I fell. It grabbed my baby and took him away. I started crying. My mother ran to our nearest neighbour. The man came back with a stick. He went into the forest, following the tracks of the chimp. He found it. It was sitting on my baby, eating his face. My baby was still alive, but not in a good condition. When I looked at him, he was all red with blood and parts of the flesh were eaten by the chimp. Baby Jackson died in hospital a week later. Kiki is still at large, though he hasn't struck now for over a year. To Annette and the other villagers around Lake Kefruka, he remains a danger. But he's also just a symptom of an intense and growing conflict between people and wildlife. Throughout Africa today, the remaining forests, especially outside of protected areas, outside of national parks, are being cut down. Human populations are growing and people are making room for their crops. And as people cut into places where chimpanzees live, the chimpanzees have nowhere else to go. And so they do their best to make a living in the small forest patches that remain and, you know, go from one forest patch to the next. Western Uganda alone has lost hundreds of square miles of forest in just the last 10 years, mostly to make way for fields and tea plantations. The chimps who once lived in these forests have lost their home. As they try to adapt to their new human-dominated world, they'll continue to encounter people. Humans and chimps live in the same areas. And obviously chimps are opportunistic hunters and they occasionally do grab a tiny infant as a food source. And that, from a human point of view, that seems like a horrible thing. But it is just a chimp being a chimp. Deo can solve the individual cases, but is there an answer to the wider problem? Elsewhere, ex-zookeeper Angelique now works in the wild, where she often sees chimps. I'm fascinated to see them. I want to see them. They should be respected and we should conserve them as much as we can. I don't think they should be in captivity. As for Wrangham's chimps, still relatively safe within Kibale National Park, their lives will continue to be closely observed. The more we discover about chimpanzees, the more we seem to share in common. Both violent and both caring. The bad along with the good. Yet if by understanding their dark side, we can better understand ourselves, then that's a stronger reason than ever to save and study them. In some ways it is rather galling to find that chimpanzees have these unpleasant characteristics. But there is a sense in which they make chimpanzees seem more human. Because if they do something that is a little bit like making war, then that puts chimpanzees into the same sort of strange mixture that humans are. So my hope is that in talking about the violence, not only do we help learn something about humans, but in some strange way it humanizes chimpanzees and makes people care for them in a different and more informed way.