Chimpanzee rips face off8/17/2023 ![]() Because chimps tend to be wary of adult humans, especially men, their aggressive (and in some cases predatory) behavior toward people, when it occurs, falls mainly upon children. Chimps in productive forests live mostly on wild fruit, such as figs, but they will kill and eat a monkey or a small antelope when they can, tearing the body to pieces and sharing it excitedly. As adults, they’re big, dangerous animals-a male might weigh 130 pounds and be half again as strong as a similar-size man. Their total population throughout Africa-at most 300,000, possibly far less-is smaller than the human population of Wichita, Kansas. Their species, Pan troglodytes, is classified endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. When they stand, or walk upright, as they often do, they seem menacingly humanoid.Ĭhimpanzees, along with bonobos, are our closest living relatives. They drink at the same stream where village women and children fetch water. Despite the stealth, their pedestrian foraging sometimes brings them into close contact with people. (Imagine, in your own life, stepping out to weed the tomatoes and encountering a hungry cougar.) They move stealthily throughout the village, mostly on the ground because there’s no forest canopy left to swing along, high and confident, as they would in deep forest. By day, they emerge because their wild foods have largely disappeared, and they feed from the crop fields and fruit trees surrounding village homes. The chimps of Kyamajaka-maybe just a dozen or so in the village environs-nest nightly in the remnant woods at the bottom of a glen, where a small stream runs, or in the eucalyptus plantation nearby. That’s easier said than done, but the UWA recently assigned four permanent staff to this awareness campaign in western Uganda. So the immediate need, Mwandha said, is to “create awareness” among people in such areas that their caution must be high, their vigilance continuous. And with chimps in a forest patch, one moment of diverted attention by a mother as she gardens can result in a child being snatched. The native forest that once covered these hillsides is now largely gone, much of it cut during recent decades for timber and firewood, and cleared to plant crops.īut appreciating a forest for its long-term benefits, such as mitigating erosion and buffering temperature, can be difficult in the face of short-term pressures to grow crops for food. The main driver of the conflicts, it seems, is habitat loss for chimps throughout areas of western Uganda, forested lands outside of national parks and reserves, which have been converted to agriculture as the population has grown. Attacks by chimps on human infants have continued, totaling at least three fatalities and half a dozen injuries or narrow escapes in greater Muhororo since 2014. Things are still uneasy in Kyamajaka these days, for at least some people and some chimpanzees. Mujuni was rushed to a health center in a nearby town, Muhororo, but that little clinic couldn’t treat an eviscerated child, and he died en route to a regional hospital. Then, stashing the child’s battered body under some grass, the chimp fled. “It broke off the arm, hurt him on the head, and opened the stomach and removed the kidneys,” Semata said. But the chimp was rough and strong, and the fatal damage occurred fast. ![]() The boy’s screaming brought other villagers, who helped the mother give chase. The chimp saw his chance, grabbed her two-year-old son by the hand, and ran. Her four young children were with her that day, as she combined mothering with hard fieldwork, but she turned her back to get them some drinking water. “A chimpanzee came in the garden as I was digging,” Ntegeka Semata recalled during an interview in early 2017. That was the day when a single big chimp, probably an adult male, snatched the Semata family’s toddler son, Mujuni, and killed him. But on July 20, 2014, scary tribulations gave way to horror-a form of horror that has struck other Ugandan families as well. They had helped themselves to jackfruit from a tree near the Semata house. The chimps had been coming closer for a year or two, prowling all throughout Kyamajaka village, searching for food, ripping bananas from the trees, grabbing mangoes and papayas and whatever else tempted them. They could barely grow food for themselves, and now a group of desperate, bold, crop-raiding chimpanzees threatened their livelihood, maybe even their safety. ![]() Life was already hard enough for Ntegeka Semata and her family, scratching out a subsistence on their little patch of garden land along a ridgeline in western Uganda. This story appears in the August 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine. Editor's note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence that may be upsetting to some readers.
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