Maternal Bonds

	When a mother’s baby has been taken from her, she visibly mourns for days afterward, her loud and plaintive cries punctuated by periods of quiet despondency.

Monkeys and Apes: Model Mothers

We’ve all heard the expression “No man is an island,” which reflects the social nature of the human species. In fact, most primates—including apes and monkeys—are social animals, living their entire lives in groups. The strongest social units in these groups consist of mothers and their young children. Baby monkeys and apes seek contact with their mothers as soon as they are born and then cling to them—first, on their soft bellies, which provide nourishment, protection, and comfort, and later, on their backs, which provide a vantage point for exploring the larger world. Monkey mothers do not leave their infants in nests—instead, they carry them wherever they go, nurturing the mother-infant bond.

Mother and Child: The Strongest Bond

While new babies are always a source of great excitement in primate societies, the fiercely protective monkey mother shields her child from the enthusiastic arms of the rest of the troop—the other members of the group are forced to wait to shower their affection on the new arrival. Eventually, the mother allows her baby to be held by other monkeys, who touch, groom, cuddle, and play with the youngster. The community takes an active role in helping to raise the child. In fact, macaques and most baboons live in female-bonded societies in which first-time mothers are particularly nurtured. Their female relatives keep a watchful eye on them and make sure that they get enough food. Female vervet monkeys even help each other care for their infants.

However, the strongest bond witnessed in primate societies is between a mother and her children. Even large male chimpanzees go to their aged mothers to be soothed by grooming after they have been threatened by others. The females of most monkey species stay with their mothers for their entire lives, and when the mothers reach old age, their daughters are there to take care of them. Primatologist Jessica Ganas remembers an extremely old female rhesus macaque who lived on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico: “She was 31 years old—very old for a macaque. She was so old and decrepit that she could barely keep up with the group as they traveled the island. But her youngest daughter, a mother herself, was always there. She spent a lot of time with her mom, a former alpha female, now at the bottom of the hierarchy. She was often found next to her mother, grooming her while mom slept. If mom got into a bit of trouble, she was the first one there to defend her.”

Exploiting the Mother-Infant Bond

In the wild, trappers who are hired by the experimentation industry exploit the bond between primate mothers and their babies by shooting mother primates from trees and then capturing the babies who cling, panic-stricken and frightened, to their mothers’ dead bodies. They also capture any other family members who gather around the mothers’ bodies. When babies are captured alive, they often become sick and die when they are denied proper food and care and crammed into tiny baskets for long journeys away from their homes and families.

The Trauma of Loss

Primate mothers, naturally, raise hell and put up a fight when the infants who are clinging tightly to them are taken away. Mother monkeys and apes love and care attentively for their babies and are traumatized by their loss. Writes anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: “Monkeys born blind or suffering from gross locomotor deficits like spastic cerebral palsy are assiduously cared for, so long as they can initially cling. Being able to hold tight seems to be the only viability test newborn monkeys are subjected to. Pass that test, and the mother soon after learns to recognize and love the baby as her own. Thereafter, she holds him even if the baby becomes too weak to cling. Once emotionally attached, a monkey or ape mother will carry for days the limp, even decomposing, body of an infant [who] has died. Ever so gently, the mother lays the corpse on the ground while she feeds, fetching it when she is ready to move on. Gradually, the distance between the mother and the object of false hopes extends. She moves farther and farther away to feed. Elapsed time between visits to the now desiccated corpse grows longer until, reluctantly, one day, with obvious ambivalence, the mother leaves behind the flattened strip of fur.”

In laboratories, technicians separate babies from their mothers by placing the mother and baby into a “squeeze cage,” which is a small wire contraption with a panel at the back that can be pulled forward by two handles. The mother and clinging infant are forced to the front of the cage, often causing the resistant mother’s limbs, body, and face to be crushed up against the thin metal bars. The squeeze cages are equipped with leg holes, which are normally used to hold the limbs of adult monkeys so that injections can be given or blood can be drawn. In this case, the technician reaches into the leg holes, grabs the tail or a limb of the baby monkey, and pulls the clinging infant off the chest of his or her mother. If she can, the mother continues to fight by holding onto her baby, so the technician pulls even harder to remove the infant. Throughout this procedure, the mother is either alarm-barking or screaming, and the infant is often screaming as well. Both the mother and the infant usually defecate because of the stress and fear. The infant, often with the placenta still attached, is eventually removed through the leg hole of the cage.

Primate mothers form firm attachments with their young soon after birth, and research has shown that they can distinguish their own babies from other infants even in the first few days of their babies’ lives. The infants of most macaques and baboons depend on their mothers for a very long time, generally breastfeeding for at least a year. Older siblings are still dependent on their mother while she nurses her infant, learning what to eat, where to sleep, and how to respond during crises. It is, therefore, not surprising that when a mother’s baby has been taken from her, she visibly mourns for days afterward.

Primatologist Jessica Ganas and former laboratory animal caretaker Nancy Megna write about what they witnessed at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center: “[The mother] emits either lost calls, waiting in vain for a response from her stolen baby, or she makes a mourning type of crying vocalization. She does this constantly, sometimes sitting far from the group at the edge of the compound, sometimes sitting near the door to her indoor quarters, looking in. When she sees a Yerkes’ vehicle drive by, her calls become even more persistent. If an employee walks by, the mother will often follow along the whole distance of the fence of her enclosure, looking directly at the employee as she emits her lost call. Babies, too, make plaintive lost calls, in hopes of being reunited with their mother. This traumatic experience may happen repeatedly, with mothers losing baby after baby to the hands of researchers.”

Read more about how primate babies are stolen from their mothers.

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