From ape clans to nations, the battle goes on

Now would be a good time to watch a Netflix documentary series called Chimp Empire. It's about one year of an ongoing war between two bands of chimpanzees, shot up close and personal, and the narrator never suggests that there is any similarity between their war and our wars. He doesn’t need to. You'd have to be dead to miss it.

- Gwynne Dyer

The central issue, as in most human wars, is about territory, or more precisely, the resources it contains. Fruit trees near the constantly patrolled border between the territories of the two chimp groups in Uganda's Kibale National Park are the apple of discord in this case. The aim of the game is to shift that boundary eastward to include those trees (the Western band) or to keep it where it is (the Central group). It’s rather like the recent mini-war between Thailand and Cambodia, currently stalled by a ceasefire — although the bone of contention in the human case is only a symbol (an ancient temple) rather than a resource of real value.

But it's not a single-minded struggle over resources in the case of the rival chimpanzee bands either. It has only been a few decades since the Western band broke away from the bigger Central group (chimpanzee bands fission if they grow much past 100 members), and the rivalries between powerful senior males of the two groups have continued to fester.

It would be disrespectful to compare the high drama of the broken alliance between the Shinawatra and Hun families, who dominated Thai and Cambodian politics in recent times, to a border war led by high-status members of two neighbouring chimpanzee bands in Uganda. Nevertheless, there is a certain resonance in the circumstances.