Animals are a lot like people. It's wonderful that they exist, but they are not nice.
The conventional view is that gorillas, like bonobos, rarely turn violent... Now a surprising series of observations of mountain gorillas in Africa's Virunga Mountains, published in the journal Scientific Reports, has overturned this view of gorillas.
In the first observed attack, a solitary male named Inshuti approached a group of 26 individuals, but was chased off by three males. When the males caught up with Inshuti, they pinned him to the ground and started to attack. The rest of the group soon followed and the mob started to bite, kick and pull out his hair. "The alpha male repeatedly sank his teeth into his body and shook his head back and forth, similar to a canid shaking prey," the authors report... The attack stopped about four minutes later and Inshuti, though injured, escaped.
In 2010 a separate and even larger group of 42 gorillas attacked an unknown lone male. Again he was hit, kicked and dragged. But this time the attack lasted much longer: it went on for 18 minutes until the victim managed to flee... In all three cases the entire group participated in the attacks, including females and juveniles.
Gorillas tend to live in groups with one male and multiple females. But these groups are different. There are now several with three or more males. "In groups like that, the costs of engaging in this kind of behaviour are pretty low, because the victim is so badly outnumbered," says Rosenbaum.
"It's possible that the things [Fossey] saw then were actually less representative of 'normal'," says Rosenbaum. "But that's pure speculation, and it's unclear exactly how long we would need to watch them to come up with a meaningful picture of what 'normal' looks like."
The change to their group structures – with more males present – has made today's gorilla group structures more similar to humans and chimpanzees. In chimps, violent aggression is often attributed to an "imbalance of power". Something similar appears to be going on with these gorillas. However, in chimpanzees and humans, it is usually only males that do the attacking, not the entire group. Another difference is that these gorilla attacks did not appear premeditated, whereas humans and chimps are known to actively seek out victims.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161128-groups-of-gorillas-have-turned-violent
It's amazing how often people forget that people are animals. So it should not surprise us that people share many traits with animals. It would be surprising if it was otherwise.
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