Baboons NOT Kidnapping Stray Dogs to Raise as Pets

This 3-minute video clip of baboons and stray dogs from “Animals Like Us” has had over 400,000 views on YouTube. It claims to show how adult male baboons “kidnap” puppies which are then brought up as pets. And this is the story being passed around the web.

The place in question is the Ta’if rubbish dump in Saudi Arabia where both baboons and dogs scavenge from the refuse. Unfortunately, this clip has been extracted from a longer program which might shed more light on what is happening but to me it looks like careful editing to make a story that fits the aim of the program i.e. finding instances of animal behavior more typically associated with humans.

Despite the claims made, to my eye, this video does NOT show baboons kidnapping puppies to raise as pets. More realistically it shows an inquisitive male baboon investigating the puppy before eventually getting bored and wandering off plus the fact that the baboons and dogs live in very close proximity with interaction between the two. As one canine ethologist put it “…Baboons and dogs share the same environment, and they are socially plastic…” but jumping to the conclusion of kidnapping for pet-raising is a leap too far.

I have seen young macaque monkeys in Thailand “grooming” stray dogs for the edible fleas they harbor, which has similarities to what was happening at the end of the Ta’if clip but was clearly not a social bond.

There is something interesting going on at Ta’if and maybe there are parallels with the human/dog story but I find the anthropocentric claims of the program makers unfortunately distracting and misleading.