<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Jane Goodall's early notebooks were worse than the... > Jane Goodall's early notebooks were worse than the sanitized mythology that grew up around chimpanzees afterward. Males attacked unfamiliar females and seized their infants; one infant was killed and partly eaten. At Gombe, a female named Passion and her daughter Pom went further than anyone had prepared the public to hear: over roughly two years they hunted the newborns of females inside their own community, took the infants from their mothers by force, killed them with a bite to the head and then sat together and ate them, unhurried, sharing the meat as they would share a monkey. Decades later, researchers examining 47 years of Gombe records documented thirteen female-led infanticidal attacks. The victims were generally neonates. They were usually eaten. The attackers preferentially targeted likely competitors with overlapping feeding areas, and the victims were commonly lower-ranking mothers without kin nearby to help them, while the attackers themselves stood in the position of lower risk. Read that again without the comforting zoological vocabulary: a powerful female waits for a vulnerable mother with inadequate protection, wrenches the newborn from her arms, kills it and eats it while the mother watches. That is not a horror screenplay. That is a field station. {{Female chimpanzees have taken other mothers' newborns by force, killed them, and eaten them in front of them. Nurture and predation were never on opposite sides of the species line; they were issued to the same animal.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Jane Goodall's early notebooks were worse than the sanitized mythology that grew up around chimpanzees afterward. Males attacked unfamiliar females and seized their infants; one infant was killed and partly eaten. At Gombe, a female named Passion and her daughter Pom went further than anyone had prepared the public to hear: over roughly two years they hunted the newborns of females inside their own community, took the infants from their mothers by force, killed them with a bite to the head and then sat together and ate them, unhurried, sharing the meat as they would share a monkey. Decades later, researchers examining 47 years of Gombe records documented thirteen female-led infanticidal attacks. The victims were generally neonates. They were usually eaten. The attackers preferentially targeted likely competitors with overlapping feeding areas, and the victims were commonly lower-ranking mothers without kin nearby to help them, while the attackers themselves stood in the position of lower risk. Read that again without the comforting zoological vocabulary: a powerful female waits for a vulnerable mother with inadequate protection, wrenches the newborn from her arms, kills it and eats it while the mother watches. That is not a horror screenplay. That is a field station. Female chimpanzees have taken other mothers' newborns by force, killed them, and eaten them in front of them. Nurture and predation were never on opposite sides of the species line; they were issued to the same animal.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-jane-goodalls-early-issued-same-animal ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->