2024-03-18 15:07:04
Of the thousands of animal videos that flood social media and often actually tell interesting things about animal behavior, the one from the “Cucumber Grape Study” is still one of the most entertaining and astonishing. Two capuchin monkeys in boxes next to each other, a scientist invites them to do an exchange transaction that is familiar to the animals: They have to hand her a token and in return they each receive a piece of cucumber.
Both take part, even a second time. Then one monkey gets a grape for his stone, the other a cucumber. The grape is eaten, the piece of cucumber – the less attractive delicacy – flies out of the cage, thrown out, our understanding gaze cannot interpret it otherwise, frustrated anger at the injustice.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, head of a study published in 2003, of which the video is part, did not interpret this behavior in such a completely humanizing way. In his decades-long study of monkeys, he did not go so far as to say that they have a moral consciousness, but he did say that they and some other animal species have cognitive abilities that are needed to develop morality: empathy, a feeling for Fairness and for reciprocity.
Frans de Waal, born in 1948 in s’Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands like Hieronymus Bosch, whom he admired, was a pioneer in this field, or, as he himself wrote in a book, toilet frog: someone who, like a frog sitting in the toilet – that there should be – stubbornly maintaining his position while all sorts of unsavory things wash over him.
The fact that, while research emphasized aggressive behavior in animals, he turned to strategies used by chimpanzees and bonobos to resolve conflicts, and that he described their kisses and hugs after differences as “reconciliation,” caused ongoing contradiction. Many of his research results have now been confirmed; in ethology, the difference between humans and animals is increasingly viewed as gradual.
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Even after his retirement as professor of psychobiology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he also headed the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution, he brought his findings to a broader public with his characteristic love of storytelling. Many of his books are bestsellers. “I brought the monkeys a little closer to the people, but I also brought the people down a little,” Emory University quoted him as saying in their obituary. As was only announced at the weekend, Frans de Waal died on March 14th at the age of 75.
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