Baboons are highly intelligent, curious, and social animals. They live in complex groups of 10 to 200 and depend on each other for companionship, affection, and survival. Like human parents, adult baboons tend to newborns around the clock. Babies stay close to their mothers, clinging to them as they forage for food and snuggling into their laps for a nap.
Baboons spread out in small groups during the day and gather at night in sleeping clusters that may include hundreds of animals. In the morning, alpha-male baboons swap information about which direction might offer the greatest bounty of food, and the group decides which way to go next. Primatologists have documented more than 30 distinct vocalizations—ranging from grunts to barks to screams—that baboons use to communicate with each other.
According to a BBC report, a group of baboons in eastern Uganda staged a public "sit-in" after a speeding truck killed a female from their troop. The grieving baboons surrounded her body in the middle of the road and refused to move for 30 minutes, blocking the highway completely. Even when passersby tried to tempt them away with food, the baboons refused to leave their deceased family member. Another group of baboons threw sticks and stones at passing cars after a baby baboon from their troop was killed on the same road.
In laboratories, baboons used as "research tools" are denied all that is natural to them. Crammed into barren metal cages, they suffer unbearable loneliness. Mother baboons, who fuss over and care attentively for their young in the wild, have their babies taken away from them. Trapped in their tiny prisons, they are usually deprived of the ability to take more than a few steps in any direction, let alone roam over long stretches of land as they would in the wild.
Experimenters at Columbia University caused strokes in baboons by removing their left eyeballs and using the empty eye sockets to clamp critical blood vessels leading to their brains. They also pumped nicotine and morphine into pregnant baboons and their fetuses.
Read more about Columbia University's cruel experiments at ColumbiaCruelty.com.