Why would a male chimpanzee kill a baby chimpanzee?

Once I witnessed a male chimpanzee hitting a baby chimpanzee on the wall through the cage. The baby was bleeding. Its chimpanzee mother trying was to reach it and there was a commotion along other chimpanzees. This lasted until a zoo keeper came with a hose. Why the male had acted like that?|||The males of many species will often kill young they know or suspect are not their own. They do this both to give their own offspring a better chance of survival, and so that the mother will mate again - he can then mate with her, and father his own young. Female chimpanzees try to combat this tendency by mating with many males - that way, all those who mated with her are potentially the father of her young, and will not harm it. In captivity, groups are usually composed of several females and a single mature male to minimize this sort of infanticide - if there's only one male, he knows all offspring born are his. It's possible the one you saw attacking the baby was an adolescent male approaching adulthood - he may have been attempting to get rid of the dominant male's young, hoping to oust him and mate with the mother himself. Zoos usually remove adolescent males from the group before things get to this stage - possibly they had not realized he was old enough to think about challenging the alpha male.|||This is instinctive, and comes from the fact that the males of all wild animals want to make sure "their" genes are passed on to the next generation rather than those of a rival males. If the baby is not his, he does not want it to survive. And, the sooner the offspring is gotten rid of the sooner the female will be receptive to mating again, and this time with "him". It's survival of the fittest.


In some animals, a male will force himself onto a female that's just been mated with so that his sperm will wash out the sperm of the rival male and "his" genes will win out in her fertilization.


Male animals do not always fight among themselves to assure dominance. Sometimes it is done this way to assure their genes are the "dominant" ones.|||He found out it wasn't his kid. Just kidding.





Often times animals will kill off young if they feel that there is not a large enough food supply to support the overall population. In zoos the food supply is so regulated that the male could have felt that there wouldn't be enough food for his whole group so he pick a baby out to kill.