“There was more to this than a score card of winners and losers”
OPINION
Are we hooked on the idea that life on Earth is a constant and ever-unfolding drama? What if life is really mostly about tolerance and compromise?
Recently, I had the chance to closely observe vervet monkeys and I really grew to hate them. Modest in size at up to half a metre in length and slight, these grey-green primates (with adult males sporting anything-but-modest blue testicles) were a menace.
Ubiquitous across many regions of sub-Saharan Africa and naturalised in parts of the Caribbean and as far west as Florida, my time with the vervets was at a resort on the Kenyan coast where they invariably mobbed, mugged and harassed tourists and their children.
The monkeys took food and even mobile phones, snatching them with calm reassurance. In response, the humans would barter to get their devices back. The vervets’ behaviour was remarkable but extremely annoying at the same time.
What is even more remarkable is the vervets read of my general demeanour – they had me down with the naïve tourist cohort which, frankly, as a proud Kenyan-born black woman is just embarrassing as hell. Yes, the little monkeys really got inside my head. But they also got me thinking too. What is the true nature of this relationship?
Kleptoparasitism, where one species steals food at the cost of another doesn’t capture the whole picture, at least to my mind. They may have been pinching our food, and generally causing a public nuisance, but the energetic cost to us was negligible. Watching the monkeys work their patch, I felt convinced there was more to this relationship than a simple score card of winners and losers. Regardless of their anti-social behaviour, they were being tolerated.
Interspecies relationships are usually characterised in the scientific literature by gain and loss – parasitism, commensalism, mutualism, amensalism, and so on, but it’s hard to find many examples of tolerance and compromise.
“Tolerance is difficult to define,” writes Rivka T Witenberg, honorary research fellow in psychology at the Australian Catholic University, “which may have led to limiting the study of tolerance in psychology in favour of studying prejudice.” Witenberg’s research in our own species reveals that people reject prejudice and choose tolerance between 70-80 per cent of the time, and th
