Sapolsky, Robert. A Primate's Memoir. Book Report

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Dominant baboons, the most 'confident' members of the tribe, are the least stress-prone. In short, the alphas of the group are cool, confident leaders who are able to relax about the place in the hierarchy. Low-stress, low-testosterone males were also more likely to show affection through social grooming while high-stress, high-testosterone males, just like their human counterparts, were more apt to suffer from stress-related diseases and exhibit aggressive and anxious behaviors (Sapolsky 167).

Sapolsky came to the Kenyan baboon tribe assuming to find some commonalities between the animal kingdom and primates. However, establishing intimacy with the baboons was more difficult than he anticipated, and at first he found himself in the uncomfortable position of shooting darts with anesthetizing blow guns. To compare the stress hormones between the different baboons required Sapolsky to behave almost like the type of big game hunter he despised. First, he had to watch his subjects interact in a group, observe their stress-related behaviors or lack thereof, track his subjects down, put them to sleep with a dart, carry them to the lab, and then take blood measurements to study animals scientifically, humans must distance themselves from the animal world and subdue animals -- that is the paradox of being an animal lover driven to become a behaviorist.

The need for distance as well as affection when studying animals can be a difficult balance to achieve: are those who seem to get overly emotionally involved, like Diane Fossey, a woman with whom the young Sapolsky once wanted to work, although now he harbors mixed feelings for her anthropomorphic view of baboons.

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Yet even Sapolsky, after abandoning his early idealism, still wept for his uncooperative ape friends when the group suffered a plague and lost many of its members.

Despite his love for the creatures he studies, Sapolsky is not a sentimentalist about Africa. He portrays a world of local corruption, bureaucracy, civil strife, and tribal warfare. Negotiating local politics and performing scientific observation is not something primatologists train for: this struggle between African human civilization and the rights of animals eventually took Dian Fossey's life in Rwanda (Sapolsky 223). Although Sapolsky navigates this minefield with greater diplomacy than Fossey, in his estimation the rituals of the native warrior peoples and mire of Kenyan politics seem as strange, if not stranger, than that of the society of baboons, who also show compassion and violence to one another. Kenya underwent a failed coup during Sapolsky's studies. The world of politics and human life seems utterly separate from his focus on science, and the baboon's self-enclosed world. But while human politics may ebb and flow, the fundamental truths about human and animal nature Sapolsky strove to learn seem constant -- as is the desire of man to learn more about….....

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