Frans de Waal Changed How We Think About Animals, Ourselves Included

Ending “Anthrodenial”

His work has always been distinguished, says The Naked Ape author Desmond Morris, by a rare “combination of objectivity and imagination.” De Waal knows the names of his chimps, their friends and family, their rivals, their characteristic facial expressions and vocalizations, their quirks of personality. He does not worry about the old rule in Western science against attributing feelings, thoughts or even individuality to mere animals. Rather, he writes of animals and humans sharing a “vast common ground” of behaviors. “Instead of being tied to how we are unlike any animal, human identity should be built around how we are animals that have taken certain capacities a significant step farther.”

Back when de Waal started out, the ban on “anthropomorphism” was intended to discourage naively projecting human states of mind onto animals, But the intended objectivity was often an illusion. Scientists were happy to describe two chimps as “rivals,” according to de Waal, but balked at the idea that chimps could also sometimes be friends. (The word “affiliative” seemed to come more readily to their lips.) They projected their own interest in aggression onto their study animals. (In fact, it turns out, chimps and most other primates spend only about 5 percent of their day in aggressive encounters.) Worse, says de Waal, the underlying idea of an absolute divide between the behaviors of animals and humans was paralyzing, a kind of anthropodenial.” It turned the animals into robots, “blind actors in a play” that only we understood. But in real life, animals don’t act that way. At the Arnhem zoo, for example, one of de Waal’s favorite chimps was a deposed alpha named Yeroen whose blustering shows of dominance no longer impressed because he needed to sit down afterward “with eyes shut, panting heavily.” Yeroen was enough of a schemer to play the younger males off one another and hang on as a kingmaker. He allied himself with Nikkie, helping him to become the alpha. In repayment, Nikkie indulged the old fox’s sexual forays with females in the group, a privilege the alpha would normally try to preserve for himself. To keep the boss on edge, Yeroen would sometimes side with Nikkie’s rival Luit. Yeroen was anything but a blind actor in this drama.

De Waal came to view chimpanzee life mainly as an endless round of challenges, fights, coalition-building and brokering of favors. He had witnessed the treetop reconciliation between Nikkie and Luit, and he had an idea that peacemaking behaviors were essential to hold the group together through all this maneuvering. But the maneuvering still dominated his thinking. “Whole passages of Machiavelli seem to be directly applicable to chimpanzee behaviour,” he wrote in Chimpanzee Politics, an account of his years at Arnhem.

If Machiavelli’s The Prince had been the first book to frankly describe the power motives and manipulations among the human elite, Chimpanzee Politics, published in 1982, was the first to show that these behaviors were embedded in our animal evolution. De Waal wrote that his work at Arnhem had taught him ”that the roots of politics are older than humanity.” It wasn’t a case of projecting human patterns onto chimpanzees: “The reverse is nearer the truth; my knowledge and experience of chimpanzee behaviour has led me to look at humans in another light.”

“Anthropodenial” turned the animals into “blind actors in a play”
that only we understood. In real life, animals don’t act that way.

The idea of chimpanzee politics naturally attracted the interest of reporters, who asked questions like “Who do you consider to be the biggest chimpanzee in our present government?” De Waal declined to make such a comparison. “People do it to mock the politicians,” he remarked, “but I feel they insult my chimps.” On the other hand, politicians themselves have sometimes seen a resemblance.

When he became speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995, Newt Gingrich placed Chimpanzee Politics on his list of recommended reading for incoming Republicans. Gingrich himself proved adept at fierce infighting, but seems not to have paid as much attention to the parts of the book about reconciliation. He eventually had to resign from Congress after the Republicans suffered massive losses in the 1998 elections. De Waal, by contrast, went on after Chimpanzee Politics to emphasize peacemaking. What struck him as he watched his chimpanzees was that serious injuries rarely occurred duringfights within the group. Nikkie and Luit, for instance, never exchanged an actual blow during their brawl before Nikkie’s gesture of peace in the oak tree; their only physical contact occurred as part of the reconciliation. Likewise, Bjorn may bite in the wrong places, but he never unleashes the deadly force chimpanzee males can deploy against outsiders. When de Waal was starting out, the best explanation for such restraint came from an eminent evolutionary biologist who concluded “with a lot of fancy mathematics” that animals generally don’t try to kill one another because if they did, their rivals might kill them. “It was so simplistic and so limiting in perspective,” says de Waal. “It didn’t talk about animals liking each other or needing each other or living together. It just talked about fear of injury.”