Male-Female Frienships in Kinda Baboons and Subsequent Connotations

Jake Frietze

April 8, Blog Post 2

Male-Female Frienships in Kinda Baboons and Subsequent Connotations


    In “Can Guys and Girls Really Just Be Friends? Ask These Baboons.” written by Olivia Ferrari in early 2025, the author discusses the findings Anna Weyher, a primatologist having studied a population of Kinda baboons for nine years. Weyher found that Kinda baboons exhibit close, long term (a lot of the time lifelong) close relationships between males and females. What is surprising is that these relationships do not always involve mating, with some male-female companions maintaining relationships while mating with other individuals and females raising young. Weyher and the author imply that these relationships are “what we call friendships”, suggesting a unique difference in the socialization of this population with other baboons– such as the yellow baboons which are much more male-dominated, aggressive, and non-friendly. 

    In class, we have discussed the nuances of placing human attributes onto primates, specifically in the context of primate rights in research studies. First, these findings do suggest a male-female friendship-esque social function with these primates. However, there is issue with ascribing human concepts and emotions to primates; it could lead to these behaviors being misinterpreted due to an emotional human bias. In addition, I think this study has interesting implications for the research world. For example, just how similar do primates have to be to humans behaviorally for people to possibly start considering more restrictions on their use in research? I could see this occurring due to the results of this study. 


    Male-female platonic friendships are very humanized behaviors which carry a lot of emotion for people due to our own individual experiences and connotations with the term. Finding
primates who exhibit these behaviors could revise our feelings toward their “humanity” as described in the Aguilera study which could have interesting consequences for both research and general viewpoints.


References


https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/kinda-baboons-male-female-friendships


https://neprimateconservancy.org/kinda-baboon/


https://phys.org/news/2025-02-kinder-gentler-social-life-kinda.html

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