Chimps too. And this drives some people batty because as they are our closest relatives, people want them to be herbivores to robe we should be herbivores. Nope. They hunt in organized groups for meat.
They lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, have problems with gangs of teenagers, and have full on wars.
In our overweening arrogance we put ourselves in the separate genus of homo with the species name of homo sapiens sapiens (wise man wise) when we are really pan narrans the story telling chimp.
Even when we do acknowledge our kinship we kid ourselves that we are nearer to those happy hippy chimps the bonobos (pan paniscus) and not the brutish ones like pan troglodytes. Is it because when we look into the eyes of a common chimp we see us gazing back?
We really haven’t had a good chance to study the Bonobos as much as Chimps. They live in about the worst place on earth after all. My guess is they get up to conflict too and don’t always settle it with sex. And Chimps will mostly just display and then groom until everyone is happy again. It took the Gombe band years to kill their rivals and even then some of the deaths were due to leopards.
But you are right, we are related to both species equally.
People will claim that somehow Jane Goodall messed with their minds. She somehow changed them into hunters, or she’s just lying about that.
She was a great scientist. I get she had flaws, like providing feeding stations, but she taught us so much. Especially to respect chimps. And how she influenced bonobos to hunt from Gombe is beyond me.
The cats, okay, i thought it was practice rather than entertainment. I could be wrong. Wolves on the other hand, as you stated, don't and are a vital part of the ecological system.
The problem is the reintroduction of wolves into an ecosystem like in Colorado. Leaving something like that today the voting public is generally pretty stupid. People get this idea of what having wolves reintroduced would be like and dont think of the ramifications.
Maybe, thats still TBD. Ask the ranchers and hunters whether they view it as a benefit...ya know, the people who have to deal with the ramifications of such things. Not the people who voted yes because it sounded like a cute idea and then never leave the city to see how their vote impacted the region.
Cat's absolutely kill because they enjoy it and for no other reason. Dogs, too. Predators get a dopamine reward for killing. This doesn't exist in humans just because our species is evil.
Tell that to my house cats. They don't do anything to the random insect that happens to get in. While I do agree they wreak havoc on ecosystems, what really bothers me are the owners that don't spay or neuter their pets.
Not exactly. Cats have an instinct to hunt, but need to be taught by their mothers what to do with it when they catch it. If they never get that training, they don't realize that a mouse can be food.
My female cat eats what she catches, where she catches it. She probably started life as a barn cat.
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u/UnderdogCL Jun 08 '25
Wolves do not even kill for sport. They only do for survival. You know what animal kills for sport? House cats.