Shooting Times & Country Magazine
A sporting life in Africa
We know primates are closely related to us yet they sometimes remind us how different they are
Primatologist Dr Jane Goodall, whose documentaries about chimpanzees made her famous, says the COVID-19 pandemic is nature’s revenge for destroying animals and their habitat. “We have brought it on ourselves,” Dr Goodall recently told National Geographic. “We’re hunting them, eating their meat, trafficking them, selling them around the world as pets or to wet markets. So it’s our fault.”
This all reminds me of the story of Frodo, who some years ago was an alpha male chimp in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, where Dr Goodall’s films were made. Frodo starred in more movies than any other chimp, but he was also a 120lb thug with silver whiskers whose despotic rule spread violence through the jungle for decades. While revving himself up for attacks he chewed his upper lip and became known for his deadly accuracy throwing stones and rolling boulders down steep slopes at rivals and humans.
He frequently attacked visiting tourists, including Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, and he did not spare the doctor herself.
As we know, chimpanzees can be extremely violent. When they are not killing and eating other primates, they enthusiastically resort to cannibalism, they torture their victims, enemy troops engage in relentless wars and females have sex with everybody.
Despite this, Dr Goodall campaigned for chimpanzees to be awarded “some kind of fundamental rights within the legal system… The line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, once thought to be so clear, has become blurred.” As justification, she pointed to the 98% of
“Frodo was a 120lb thug whose despotic rule spread violence through the jungle”
genes humans share with chimpanzees, together with clear evidence of their ability to feel emotions and to communicate in basic language.
Population
When Dr Goodall made her first observations about the Gombe chimps in 1960, the population of Tanganyika (now Tanzania) was 10million. The forests that were home to the chimpanzees once seemed to expand in all directions. Today, there are more than 56million Tanzanians. The national park at Gombe is just 13.5 square miles and is surrounded by densely inhabited smallholder farms. The place is so overcrowded that the government has encroached on what’s left of the forest and local people enter the park every day to collect firewood. Inevitably things go wrong.
One day, the wife of a park ranger and her small daughter were in the forest gathering firewood, when Frodo appeared, grabbed the child and disappeared into the trees. Once up in the branches, the ape bashed her head against a tree trunk.
By the time a patrol of park rangers came to the rescue, Frodo had disembowelled and started eating her. After this incident, I assumed Frodo would be put down and I facetiously asked Dr Goodall’s assistants — who also believed chimps should enjoy human rights — whether he might be put in court to face a judge and jury for homicide.
I was told this wasn’t a unique incident, as two other children had been attacked in previous years. Preying on human children was so expected that Dr Goodall’s own son spent much of his youth inside a cage.
Chimpanzee numbers have dwindled from millions in pre-colonial Africa to around 170,000 today — many of them living captive as pets or zoo inmates. The destruction of wildlife habitat continues apace across Africa.
In Tanzania, ruled by a socialist Revolutionary Party, projects include building a highway through the Serengeti and a vast Chinese hydro-electric dam that will inundate thousands of square miles of the Selous Game Reserve, home to one of Africa’s largest elephant populations.
As for Frodo, instead of being punished, the Tanzanian authorities — and, allegedly, the dead girl’s family — forgave him. Soon afterwards, he was deposed from his alpha male position by a younger rival named Sheldon. Frodo fell into a kind of lassitude, no longer interested in beating up tourists or even throwing rocks at his fellow apes.
In 2013, at the ripe old age of 37, he died after bite wounds to his testicles became infected.