Baboon Logic

I don’t understand people, so I study animals. Not professionally, but I take a personal interest. For example, from nature programs on television I’ve learned about the community structure of rodents in the African savannah, lizards on Komodo Island, and a cousin of the antelope that lives in the holy land. This last show interested me especially; it turns out that most species native to Israel have gone extinct, but remnant herds from elsewhere are being reintroduced. I remember that while I watched this show, I was drinking clove and mint-spiced iced tea that tasted especially good, perhaps in part because the narrator kept using the words "parched" and "heat" and each time I’d take a sip of cool tea. Probably that’s irrelevant.

These nature programs have a pattern with which I’ll bet most people are familiar. A man with a deep voice speaks as the camera pans across a broad swipe of rain forest or savannah or whatever, and then the focus zooms in on a little niche in the larger area, maybe a copse of trees, and the bugs and animals that live nearby. Usually, the show has a dramatic content – say the struggle of two cheetah cubs to learn how to hunt. Experienced viewers understand that many of the dramatic moments of these shows are fabricated. A mouse whose nose seems to be twitching in response to a nearby wildcat is either nowhere near the wildcat and is twitching his nose at something else entirely, or else he was thrown into the situation on purpose by the photographer. Also, most sound effects are dubbed in at a later time. I watched a special meta-nature show to find all this out. The underlying theme of all nature shows is the same: the struggle to survive. The struggle to survive is not fabricated.

The advantage of watching animal behavior is that there is little or no temptation to assign higher motives to the protagonists. Whatever the critters do, they do it as part of their struggle to survive. There is a soothing quality to this paradigm even when it involves the use of fangs, and body parts torn from each other. But for some episodes, I can’t help reading more into it. Sometimes, analogies to human beings leap from the tv screen, and lodge in my mind. Afterwards I carry them about and can’t help but view the people around me akin to hunting cheetah cubs, or mice with twitching noses.

The same thing happened again a few months ago, and I’ve regretted watching the tv program in question ever since. This was a special devoted to the social dynamics of a baboon troop that lived in a park in South Africa. Now in my eyes, baboons are particularly nasty looking animals. Have you ever seen one close up? I did once at the Oakland Zoo. This was a male baboon in a cage by himself. I cannot imagine a female baboon wanting to climb into that cage with him. This individual had massive, craggy features on his face – two dark eyes with a flat ridge above them that gave him a constant angry stare. His snout launched downward and two big fangs tucked into either side of his jaw. Excuse me for this, but he was defiantly male, sat on his haunches with his rear legs splayed wide open. Zoo-goers did not cluster in close around this male baboon’s cage. But we couldn’t help but stop further afield, for an open-jawed gaze. The response of our protagonist? He did not look at a single one of us for an instant. But his attitude managed to convey both that he did not give a damn about us, and that he hated us the way we hate a flea.

All that is prelude to this tv program of mine, because in a strange way that tv special taught me what that baboon in the zoo may have been thinking as he sat in his cage surrounded by gawkers. This program portrayed bigwig baboon males in the wild. In the wild a few or several head honchos of the type I saw in the cage at the Oakland Zoo will command their own troop, which consists of females with their young, plus the juveniles – young males simpering around the edges of the troop, waiting to make their move for dominance or else split for greener pastures. There is a lot to say about how a troop such as this works, the various interactions and bonds between the different baboons. I won’t say any of it. Except for this: when it comes to figuring who is the bigwig and who is the peon in a baboon troop, it all comes down to who pays attention to whom.

I found this out from the man with the deep voice on this tv program, who spoke while shots of the baboon troop in action were played. And I saw it happen myself. All the lower animals on the totem pole, the juveniles and the loser females etc., they pay scrupulous attention to what the big shot male baboons are doing. And in exchange, the big shot males pay absolutely no attention to them. They gaze off toward the horizon, so sublimely indifferent. In one scene, I saw a little teenager baboon dude abandon his dinner – he just scampered away from it – he was so intent on watching the big shot male that he didn’t have any spare energy for eating. The camera saw it happen, but the big shot male didn’t. He couldn’t be bothered to notice.

This is a simple idea, but it’s also a huge one. Paying attention is an act of submission.

To people who study animal behavior, this concept of attention is interesting because it provides a whole new answer to the question of how groups of animals cohere together. The usual answer for any question relating to animal behavior is: sex. Everything is driven by sex, and the assumption is often that sexual bonds between different animals are what cement the group structure in place. But it turns out that for baboons, and for a lot of other animals, the framework on which the group is built is who pays attention to whom.

This can have some bizarre ramifications. For example, it means that a weird looking animal might have a better chance than normal to become the king of the roost, simply because he captures the eye of the other animals. And it also means that the dominant animal doesn’t have to be the best leader or the strongest or even the most sexy to resident females. Not as long as he keeps behaving like the top dog, keeps convincing the others that they need to pay attention to him and not to anyone else.

Watching this show made me see the baboon at the zoo in a new way. I tend to cringe at cage bound animals, and still have trouble convincing myself that it’s somehow important for some critter to spend his life in a box so that people can meander around admiring his wild eyes. But I do wonder if maybe, to that one male baboon, all of us meandering people were just par for the course. Maybe we were examples of the peons that had always surrounded him, gawking at the big boss, waiting for his next move.

People. Peons. Baboons.

This notion slides home a little too quickly to me. I stopped believing in the government soon after I paid attention to the things it said. I saw the government’s word, and then I saw that it was a lie. Period. Enough for me. I saw the state bomb Yugoslavia with munitions dripping with radioactivity, under the pretense of humanitarian good, to a tune hummed by the American taxpayer. Paying attention let me see the lie.

So I turned into a news junkie. I ate it up. I scoured. Ask me about body counts. Ask me about numbers of settlements, dates, who moved in and how much they were paid. I can tell you what a WMD is, who has them, when they got them, how many, who knew, what they’ve been used for, who hasn’t used them, why we care about them, who spent money to make caring seem not to matter. I keep track. Compile lists. Cruise sites. Burn hours. I’ve burned a lot of hours. I paid attention, because the attention seemed to matter, and I’m not willing to let what’s gone on keep going on. Not while I’m still around. I still care.

And yet, what with those baboons and all, I begin to wonder what all this attention does for me, or for anyone else. My time and my life are eaten by this obsession to expose the lie. And in every instant that I chit chat about what Bush said or did or didn’t do, who pays Perle and how the state undermines the principles it seeks to uphold, at all times I seem to be enforcing this idea that the state matters, that the state has authority, because I’m willing to devote so much of my time to giving it the evil eye.

I don’t have an answer here, only some stupid questions.

I read a book about Nazi Germany, where the guy describes how as the Nazis gained power, he made some phone calls looking for a decently priced jujitsu class. This was his way of fighting the Nazis. Pretty quickly he saw this as a useless gesture. Mental jujitsu, that’s what was needed, he decided.

So by compiling my lists and filing my outrage, am I hacking jujitsu hand motions against a tidal wave?

There must be a different way. And it must have to do with how we live. Our private lives. To whom we grant authority. Where we place our focus. What we make important.

I don’t go in for being ruled by anything, and the baboon show influenced me a little too much for my own comfort. So I ditched my television set. I ditched some other things too. Streamlined. Stepped back. Whatever you need to do to survive, right?

But I’m pretty sure this is true: Even if my tv box is blackened and no photographers are on safari checking camera angles, the same stuff still happens. Can we escape this? Somewhere out in the savannah, cheetah cubs slink in the dry grass. Sooner or later, they’ll make their first kill.

July 17, 2003

Katharine Winans [send her mail] works as a scientific researcher in California.

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