Male chimpanzees who share meat with females may receive sexual favors later.
Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, Sex and War
“I know a quiet little ‘boit de nuit’–you’re going to love it!”
I was starting to get worried about my buddy Humphrey. He’d been down in the dumps for quite some time, staring into space, not flinging poop at me and the other males like he used to. I sidled up to Goliath and asked him if he’d noticed anything funny about our simian pal.
“Funny strange or funny ha-ha?” Goliath asked. Always a kidder.
“Strange. He hasn’t thrust his scrotum in my face for weeks.”
“And . . . you miss that?”
“No, but I’m worried.”
“Why worry?” Goliath said. “The fewer beta males around, the more food and sexual partners for guys like you and me.” He didn’t punch me in the shoulder, but I knew that if we had evolved into humans, he would have.
The guys, hangin’ out.
“We should talk to him,” I said.
“Include me out,” Goliath said. “Unless you need any snide remarks out of the side of someone’s mouth.”
“You’re always good for that,” I said, as I ambled off in Humphrey’s direction.
I found him sitting under a tree, chewing on a stalk of grass, looking oddly distrait, to use a phrase I picked up from Jane Goodall last time I saw her.
“How they hangin’ buddy?” I asked as I walked up, as affably as I could.
“Hangin’ low,” Humphrey said in a rare moment of emotional honesty between male primates.
“What’s the problem?”
“You’re too young to go steady.”
“Me want to reproduce.”
I walked around in front of him to look him straight in the eye. “Did you pick that up in ’20 Sure-Fire Pickup Lines’?”
“How’d you guess?”
“I had a hunch.” I sat down beside him and started to put my arm around him, then remembered the jittery reaction such physical contact produces between males and held off. “Listen, pal,” I said, adding an “sh” sound to “Listen” so I’d come off as a latent Humphrey Bogart on the off-chance he had a case of same-name hero-worship.
“Look at that poor lonely chimp!”
He looked at me and I saw tears of sadness in his eyes. I went to the tried-and-true standard formula: “You just haven’t met the right she-chimp yet.”
“They ignore me.”
“Well, what are you doing to attract them.”
He stood up, cleared his throat, and began to screech and beat his chest.
“Whoa, whoa there partner,” I said hurriedly, motioning with my front paws to keep it down. “You’re going to scare off all the sensitive types.”
“Sen-si-tive?”
“The only kind you’re going to attract that way is some broad whose lungs allow her to out-yell other females for light beer at a wet t-shirt night. You want somebody you can settle down with and breed, so your DNA will be perpetuated.”
“What I do?”
“Do you ever ask them out for dinner?”
“Dinner?” Hoo-boy, we needed to begin at the beginning.
“Yes, pick some quiet spot, then you bring her some meat.”
“But . . . Humphrey need meat.”
“Sure you do, kiddo, but if you share it with a female, you have a better chance of doing the ookey-nookey with her later.”
For the first time his face took on a thoughtful expression. “So pick out girl . . .”
“Yes.”
“Kill something.”
“Crude–but yes.”
“Give her some.”
“You’re on the right track.”
“Then . . . jump her bones?”
“I know you want to hop into bed. Can I finish my risotto first?”
I groaned. Here I thought we were more or less equally advanced in terms of mating skills. “No, you don’t jump her bones right away.”
“But you say . . .”
“I didn’t finish. The rule is dinner and a movie first.”
Pretty much like humans, then, huh?