All you wanted to know about bonobos

Our Far-Flung Correspondents: Swingers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

This is a long (12 page!) article from the New Yorker about bonobos, the (supposedly) sex-loving hippy apes of the Congo.

As you may expect, all is not what it seems. The first page of the article is very amusing, pointing out the seriously weird attitude that some people have of bonobos as societal role models. At a fund raiser for bonobo conservation, the writer meets "Wind":

I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event. He was a musician and a former practitioner of “metaphysical counselling,” which he also referred to as clairvoyance. He said that he had encountered bonobos a few years ago at Georgia State University, at the invitation of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist known for experiments that test the language-learning abilities of bonobos. (During one of Wind’s several visits to G.S.U., Peter Gabriel, the British pop star, was also there; Gabriel played a keyboard, another keyboard was put in front of a bonobo, and Wind played flutes and a small drum.) Bonobos are remarkable, Wind told me, for being capable of “unconditional love.” They were “tolerant, patient, forgiving, and supportive of one another.”...

It was Wind’s turn to perform. “Help Gaia and Gaia will help you,” he chanted into a microphone, in a booming voice that made people jump. “Help bonobo and bonobo will help you.”

Yes, no doubt, if we all lived like bonobos, there would be no global warming.

The problem is, a lot of bonobo research was based on captive groups:

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?”

Bonobos in the wild are not always nice. For that matter, nor are bonobos in zoos:

“I once saw five female bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland,” he said. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth. Now, that’s something to counter the idea of”—Stevens used a high, mocking voice—“ ‘Oh, I’m a bonobo, and I love everyone.’ ”

Stevens went on to recall a bonobo in the Stuttgart Zoo whose penis had been bitten off by a female.

I'll stick with the humans for the moment.