Abusive Macaque Mothers
Maternal Abuse and Behaviours
Early experience affects the intergenerational transmission of infant abuse in rhesus monkeys
| ACTION | DESCRIPTION | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | DRAGGING | the mother drags her infant by its tail or leg while walking or running; |
| 2 | CRUSHING | the mother pushes her infant against the ground with both hands; |
| 3 | THROWING | the mother throws her infant at a short distance with one hand while standing or walking; |
| 4 | STEPPING OR SITTING ON | the mother steps on her infant with one foot or both feet, or sits on her infant; |
| 5 | ROUGH GROOMING | the mother forces her infant onto the ground, and pulls out the infant's hair with force causing distress calls; |
| 6 | ABUSIVE CARRYING | the mother carries the infant with one arm away from her body, preventing the infant from clinging; |
| 7 | HITTING | the mother violently slaps her infant with one hand or arm; |
| 8 | CONTACT | making contact, breaking contact, cradling, grooming, restraining and rejecting; |
ROUGH GROOMING (Action No 5)
Watch her hands she starts to scrape them quickly across the baby's back. This only happens with new born monkeys. Sometimes the mother will pick the baby up, smell it, then carry it elsewhere to start over. Baby's are dragged in dirt and water and each time the mother scrapes it heavily with both hands and pushes it around. It appears that she doesn't like the way the baby smells and is trying to cleanse it unknowingly killing her infant.
Scientific Studies
Whether abusive parenting in rhesus macaques is transmitted from mothers to daughters and if transmission occurs through genetic or experiential factors.
Results suggest that the intergenerational transmission of infant abuse in rhesus monkeys is the result of early experience and not genetic inheritance.
- Infant abuse occurs in the first few months of infant life and manifests itself as infant dragging, crushing, throwing, stepping, sitting on, or biting.
- The consequences of abuse range from superficial scratches and bruises to serious injury and death.
- Abusive mothers alternate short bouts of abuse with long periods of appropriate caregiving behavior and do not show any gross abnormalities in their social interactions with their conspecifics.
- Mothers who have abused their offspring in the past are likely to repeat the same patterns of behavior with their successive infants, suggesting that abusive parenting is a relatively stable maternal characteristic.
- Most patterns of infant abuse are qualitatively distinct from any other behaviors in the maternal repertoire and are never exhibited by most individuals within a population, including first-time mothers who sometimes exhibit clumsy behavior with their infants (e.g., they hold them upside down). Therefore, abusive mothers and their behavior are readily identifiable.
Source
Maestripieri D. (2005). Early experience affects the intergenerational transmission of infant abuse in rhesus monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(27), 9726–9729. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0504122102
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