Throwing Stones

There is a story that is making the rounds in lots of newspapers about a chimpanzee in the Furvik Zoo on the Baltic coast of Sweden. The gist of the story is that Santino, a 30 year old male chimpanzee, has been hurling rocks at his visitors for the past eleven years.

Scientists find his behavior to be a clear-cut example of chimp's ability to plan for future events--one of the behaviors that was previously thought to separate chimps from humans. "Not instinctive behavior like a squirrel burying nuts, but planning that shows the animal is considering what its mental state will be at a later time," is how the New York Times phrases it.

It seems that Santino spends time in the early morning, before the zoo opens, gathering the stones he uses for his attacks and stockpiling them in a corner of his habitat. Then, when visitors appear later in the day, he hurls these stones in their direction. Apparently chimps are notoriously bad throwers and aimers so no one has been hurt.

Even when zoo workers removed stones from his habitat, Santino would break pieces of concrete off the walls, tear them into chunks, and hurl them at visitors.

What amazes me about the report of this behavior is the fact that scientists are overjoyed at the fact that they have discovered chimps can plan ahead, especially outside of laboratory settings. "Most primatologists would say, 'Of course they plan for future needs, they do lots of things far in advance,'" notes Mathias Osvath of Lund University, who writes about Santino in the current issue of Current Biology. "But it's very hard to prove."

I'm just as thrilled as the next guy to learn that chimps can indeed plan ahead but I am more concerned about the fact that Santino is hurling rocks at visitors. Do you think this might mean that he is BORED? or perhaps doesn't like his HUMAN CAPTORS? or is sick of BEING LOOKED AT all day long?

Why hasn't anyone addressed the roots of his behavior rather than wax poetic about what it means? If I ran the zoo, Santino might have other means of occupying his time--maybe a little hide and seek with food in his habitat or something else to challenge his mental abilities.

Better yet, I might even let him out of that cage.....