Jane Goodall was an expert on alpha males

In a lifetime studying the behavior of chimpanzees, Jane Goodall became something of an authority on the aggressiveness of alpha male adults. Now, in an interview released just days after her death, the famed primatologist reveals what she would do with Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other human beings she saw as showing similar traits: launch them on a one-way trip into space...

“There are people I don’t like, and I would like to put them on one of Musk’s spaceships and send them all off to the planet he’s sure he’s going to discover,” Goodall tells interviewer Brad Falchuk during the revelatory 55-minute special discussing her life, work and legacy...

[Musk would] be the host. You can imagine who I’d put on that spaceship. Along with Musk would be Trump and some of Trump’s real supporters,” she said.  “And then I would put [Russian president Vladimir] Putin in there, and I would put [China’s] President Xi. I’d certainly put [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu in there and his far-right government. Put them all on that spaceship and send them off.”...

In a 2022 interview with MSNBC she said [Trump] exhibited “the same sort of behavior as a male chimpanzee will show when he’s competing for dominance with another. They’re upright, they swagger, they project themselves as really more large and aggressive than they may actually be in order to intimidate their rivals.”...

“We get, interestingly, two types of alpha. One does it all by aggression, and because they’re strong and they fight, they don’t last very long. Others do it by using their brains, like a young male will only challenge a higher-ranking one if his friend, often his brother, is with him. And you know, they last much, much longer,” she said.

She also examined the “politicization” of behavior, and what her studies had taught her about aggressive behaviors shown by groups of humans and chimpanzees when confronted with something they perceived as hostile, even if no threat existed.

“Chimps see a stranger from a neighboring community, and they get all excited, and the hair stands out, and they reach out and touch another, and they’ve got these faces of anger and fear, and it catches, and the others catch that feeling that this one male has had, and they all become aggressive,” she said.

“It’s contagious,” she added. “Some of these demonstrations that turn aggressive, it sweeps through them. They all want to become and join in and become aggressive. They’re protecting their territory or fighting for dominance.”

Falchuk asked if she believed it was the same for humans. “Probably, sometimes yes. But I truly believe that most people are decent,” she said.

I quite agree with her that most people are decent.  See adjacent post about loon rescues.

Photo and text excerpted from The Guardian.