Visitors to the Bioparc zoo in the Spanish city of Valencia have been confronted with an extremely moving sight for the past three months: a chimpanzee mourning her dead baby and carrying it in her arms.
“Natalia” lost her baby when it was only a few days old. Since then, she seems unable to part with it.
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“This behaviour has been seen in the past in chimpanzees, not only in zoos but also in the wild,” Miguel Casares, the head of Bioparc, told Reuters.
Like humans, chimpanzees can mourn their own, but what is unusual is such intense and long-lasting mourning.
However, Casares says Natalia’s mourning should be respected just as it is for humans: “Our visitors, who are initially shocked by the sight of a dead infant chimpanzee, realise once we explain why we left it and why we are keeping it under observation.”
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Natalia had lost a baby of her own in 2018 as well, which is why she is now being closely monitored.
Chimpanzees are among the primates most at risk of extinction in Africa, where their population of 100,000 to 200,000 is suffering from poaching, habitat loss and disease.
