Jane Goodall's Terrifying Encounter With A Murderous Chimp

The case of the serial-killing chimp happened in 1976 in Gombe, Tanzania, in the middle of the aforementioned  — yet unrelated — four-year "chimp war." In a nutshell, as a 2007 article from Current Biology on Science Direct explains, Jane Goodall observed a mother-daughter duo, Passion and Pom respectively, yank a three-week-old chimp infant directly from its mother's arms, bite through its skull, and proceed to cannibalize the corpse. In her 1990 book "Through a Window" Goodall reflected on the incident with horror, saying, "The carcass was consumed in the way that normal prey is consumed, slowly and with relish, each mouthful of meat chewed up with a few green leaves." After this first incident, Passion and Pom killed another two times. In one instance, Goodall intervened to stop an attack by "shouting and throwing sticks and stones," as Live Science recounts.

Primate researcher Peter Buirski had the opportunity to observe Passion in 1973 three years prior to these murders and evaluate her according to the Emotions Profile Index (EPI). As Buirski wrote in 1991 in the journal Primates on Springer Link, Passion was a "a disturbed, isolated, aggressive individual" in comparison to other female chimps in Gombe. At some point after this evaluation, Passion got pregnant, had Pom, and either taught or passed along to her daughter her own, savage tendencies. In either case, Passion instigated the attacks and not her daughter, and so the EPI proved accurate and "useful in detecting social deviance."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunB9knFqaXFpZLeiusRmnqinlJa5rXnTnqmroZautq%2BzjJ6lnKelo8GmvoywoK2gXaLCs7DEq6auq12Ytaq5z2g%3D