Baboons are assholes. After leaving his birth troop at around age seven, a male will find a new one and spend his prime years trying to fang his way up the hierarchy. Once he’s gained a modicum of status, he devotes his days to terrorizing lower-ranking males and females, who only grow to half his size. Gashes, puncture wounds, and missing ears are not uncommon among baboons.
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, a primatologist living in Kenya, documented an unprecedented cultural shift when he noticed that the alpha males of a baboon population suddenly vanished. The alphas had come upon a garbage dump near a tourist lodge, and they defended their spoils furiously from low-ranking males and females, who were relegated to leaves, seeds, and insects on the forest floor. One day, in the East African heat, the alphas were exposed to tainted meat at the dump, infecting them with bovine tuberculosis. They died soon after. Left behind were sixty-two baboons. The
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