Every now and then we discover exceptional behavior in an animal, very similar to something we do humans, and we begin to investigate: the result, almost always, is that we discover that there are many different species that use the practice.
A case that is recently making a lot of sensation is that of animals that practice the emergency room on their fellow men: we have observed it in mice and orangutans, and now, thanks to a study published on Frontiers in ecology and evolutionwe can add the chimpanzees to the list of species that know medicine and prompt intervention.
Medicine leaves and insects. The study was born from an observation dated 2019, when in the forests of Gabon Alessandra Mascaro, volunteer at the Loango Chimpecanzee Project in Gabon, he observed (and filmed) for the first time A chimpanzee who “spread” an insect on the child’s wound. A curious gesture, which pushed Elodie Freyman of the University of Oxford to investigate these behaviors more deeply.
An analysis of the data collected by the various centers of conservation and protection of chimpanzees has allowed her to reconstruct at least seven documented cases of this behavior: sometimes Primates used insects on the wounds of companionsother times chewed leaves, and in two cases the “medical” chimpanzee was committing to freeing another specimen from a human trap.
Emergency Primates. Both insects used on wounds and chewed leaves have antiseptic propertieswhich suggests that chimpanzees also know and perform these gestures in an attempt to buffer the wounds of the companions and prevent them from infect. Among other things, not all the documented interventions of “emergency room” involved related specimens: there are also chimpanzees who do it without having family ties with those who are trying to treat.
Obviously there is a doubt about the effectiveness of these interventions, in the sense that we do not know how much the leaves or insects really help in hearing and disinfection, and if the interventions can “fail”. The fact, however, that many chimpanzees do so suggests that they have a certain utility, in addition to demonstrating that, as the author of the study explained, “Chimpanzees seem to recognize suffering in others and act to relieve it in some way“.
