Wild chimpanzees observed throughout Africa have been known to kill infants and then later cannibalize them. This behavior was observed in both males and females, but this infanticide occurs under different conditions. Female chimps at a young age will transfer between communities; these females are called “strangers.” Male chimpanzees will often kill and cannibalize infants of stranger females, whereas if a female kills an infant, they kill an infant from the same community. Observations of wild chimpanzees suggest that social order and likely an instinctive drive for reproductive biological success fuels chimpanzees to commit infanticide. However, cannibalism may be a learned behavior. Goodall recorded that after a mother chimp committed …show more content…
A party can range from one individual to most of the community, which explains why there is a level of familiarity between chimps that move between parties, as they are not a fixed group of individuals. Males often show more aggression to stranger females than they do to females of their own community. These stranger females are at risk from those males, and should the female have a child with her, or should she give birth to an infant in a new community or even if she is passing by a stranger community, male chimps have been recorded to attack the mother (Goodall, 1977). Sometimes, as a byproduct of an attack, the infant may die. The males then take the infant regardless of whether or not it has been killed yet, and they thrash and throw around the infant until it does die. Even then, male chimps have even been observed consuming a still living infant (Kawanaka …show more content…
Only a few males would partake in actually eating the flesh of an infant, whereas females deliberate kill and consume. Males repeatedly flail the body, while is normal behavior after they capture normal prey, but it is not normal for them to continue this behavior after they have killed it. Male chimps tend to examine, play, and groom the body of the deceased infant (Hamai 1992) (Goodall 1977). Also, it is common for male chimpanzees to pound the head or chest of the baby with its fists. After all this, the bodies of stranger infants were abandoned after very little of the flesh had been consumed, compared to other prey items for chimps would be almost totally consumed by the party (Goodall