Meat-eating 73Meat-eating
When Frankie and I made our first study of the Budongo chimpanzees, in 1962, we
did not once see meat-eating, nor did we imagine that chimpanzees would eat meat.
We concluded that they were strict vegetarians, except for invertebrates. I saw and
photographed an adult male eating ants; he let them crawl up the trunk of a tree, on to
his hand and half way up his arm where he promptly ate them. I photographed this
Budongo method of ant-eating and this picture was used on the cover of the English edition
ofBudongo: A Forest and its Chimpanzees(1965). Besides ants, we knew that chim-
panzees included fig wasps in their diet — the tiny wasps found inside figs that have a
symbiotic relationship with the fig, pollinating it and gaining food at the same time. This
certainly did not amount to meat-eating. Our study at Busingiro was followed by those
of Sugiyama (1968) and Suzuki (1971). Suzuki saw meat-eating at Busingiro (he was
also the first person to see and describe infanticide, something very different, which we
consider in Chapter 7). And meat-eating was described by both Goodall (1968) and,
together with meat-sharing, by Teleki (1973) at Gombe.
Suzuki (1971) observed the Busingiro community of chimpanzees feeding on a
young blue monkey on 13 May 1968, and on a young black and white colobus monkey
on 30 May 1968. In both cases several chimpanzees were involved, and meat-sharing
occurred in the second case.
My first reaction to these descriptions of meat-eating by chimpanzees was that this
was abnormal behaviour, because we had never seen it in our 1962 study. Goodall
described instances of the killing of a variety of species by chimpanzees — colobus
monkeys, baboons, duikers, bushpigs and other mammals. Time has proved me wrong:
meat-eating is natural for chimpanzees, not in the least abnormal. Examples of meat-
eating appeared in print from other sites where long-term studies were taking place, and
in particular from the West African site at Taï Forest in Ivory Coast. It now seems likely
that all chimpanzees eat meat, and this fact is widely known thanks to television.
Having said that, it does appear that the Sonso chimpanzees do not eat meat often.
Why did we not see it at all in our study in 1962? Those who have studied wild chim-
panzees over a decade or more concur that it is only after several years of study that this
behaviour becomes apparent, as if the chimpanzees were shy of doing it when human
observers are around, or need to be well habituated before they kill and eat animals in
the presence of human observers. Our study in 1962 was simply too short for us to see
meat-eating. The Sonso chimpanzees have been fully habituated for many years and so
we do now see it. But even when we follow the adult males all day we rarely see it. This
appears to be a real difference between our chimpanzees and those of Kibale or Gombe
or Taï, which eat meat regularly. It goes with other differences: our Sonso males do not
appear to be very good at hunting and have perhaps not developed their hunting skills as
much as have chimpanzees at some other sites.
Indeed, sometimes the Sonso chimpanzees seem to pass up opportunities to catch
monkeys and eat them. For example, in September 2003, our alpha male Duane encoun-
tered a live blue monkey in a snare. At first he threatened it but then ‘he just prodded it