It seemed to enjoy killing, especially newborn babies, and it was the worst of the vicious. It cut off the breath of babies as they sought their mothers’ breasts with tender expressions. It showed no guilt, of course, and its killing spree was not a one-time affair. It killed one baby after another in their mothers’ arms.
‘Le Massacre des Innocents’ (The Massacre of the Innocents) by Nicolas Poussin, 1628.
Infanticide was only the first step in the ‘operation’. He would approach grieving mothers, eventually succeeding in having sex with them. Once he had impregnated them, he would look for his next target. Babies to be the next targets for murder, another mother to be the next target for sex, and so on and so forth. This is the story of the Investigator, King of the Jungle.
Why did the investigator kill the female’s cubs?
A lion lying down in Namibia. Lionesses are known for killing their cubs to restore fertility to their mothers.
The reason the king of the jungle kills her own cubs is “reproductive.” Mammalian females usually don’t ovulate during lactation, meaning they’re unable to get pregnant. She can’t conceive until her cubs are well on their way to adulthood. For males, who need to pass on their offspring, this means they lose the opportunity to reproduce.
The natural world is brutal. Males don’t stand idly by while females raise their offspring; they instinctively know that killing the offspring will make the female fertile again. When an investigator kills her (other) offspring, the female also stops lactating and starts ovulating again. This is how infanticide became so prevalent among investigators. Zoologists estimate that a quarter of lion cubs that die in their first year of life are victims of infanticide.
“My cubs are mine to protect.” A female lioness with her cubs. Many lion cubs are killed in attacks by other male lions. <Photo source=Wikipedia
The biology of lions also contributes to infanticide. Males can only reproduce for two years. A lioness, on the other hand, has a birthing cycle of every two years, and if the lioness is outside of that limited time, she loses the opportunity to reproduce. The lionesses have their own reasons for trying to mate, even if it means killing their cubs.
Rhesus monkeys are another example of infanticide.
Infanticide is not limited to the king lions of the jungle. It’s common among primates and rodents, most notably the langur monkeys of India. In these groups, a dominant male rules over several females. The other males don’t even dare to touch the alpha female.
A gray langur in Maharashtra, India. <Photo by Bernard Gagnon
Then one day, a coup happens to them. It’s a “reversal of fortune” where the male alpha is defeated by a new upstart, and the new king (?)’s first act is infanticide. He goes to the extreme of killing all the children of the previous boss.
It’s an “evolutionary” behavior to allow lactating female langur monkeys to become pregnant again. Rather than sit idly by for two to three years while a female raises another male’s offspring, they’ll kill their offspring to put the mother back into heat. In fact, infanticide has been documented among 51 primate species – at least 10%, depending on how you classify them.
Responding to infanticide with an ‘orgy’?
But the mothers of the world are strong. No mother would stand idly by while a male slaughters her cubs. In the case of lionesses, they fiercely resist investigators and try to fight back.
In the case of langur monkey females, they take a more obscene approach: an “orgy. Pregnant langur monkeys sometimes sneak out of the troop to have sex with males outside the group.
“Mommy who is my daddy, you will understand when you grow up.” A tufted gray langur near Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka.
Scientists initially interpreted the langur 스포츠토토female monkeys’ behavior as “over-sexualization,” but after the confirmation of “infanticide” by the males, they came up with a new interpretation: the “paternal confusion theory. This is the strategy of having promiscuous relationships and linking up with as many males as possible. The explanation is that males have no way of knowing that a female they’ve mated with is pregnant, and since they can’t rule out the possibility that it’s ‘their child’, they hesitate to infanticide.
A mother langur and her cubs. image=Sagar Kapoor>.
It’s not just a theory, says renowned anthropologist Sarah Blapper Huddy, a professor emerita at UC Davis. “I would expect that a female, faced with the terrible predicament of her child being killed, would come up with a solution: an orgy.” In other words, to the male’s “infanticide” attack, the female responded with an “orgy” to protect her offspring.
Are humans superior to animals?
The animal kingdom is not alone in its cruelty, for while we don’t kill other people’s children to reproduce, we humans have a history of abusing and killing our own children. Countless children have had to close their eyes before seeing the light of day because they were “unable to be nurtured” or because they “gave birth to a daughter when they wanted to have a son”.
Humanity has a long history of infanticide. Pictured here is The Wrath of Medea by Éugène Delacroix. 1862. In Greek mythology, Medea, a witch, fell in love with Iason and bore him a child, but when he fell in love with someone else, she became enraged and killed him and the two children she bore.
Harvard University anthropologist Joseph Birdsell estimates that at least 15% and as many as 50% of children born in the Paleolithic were killed in infancy. Flower-like children and adorable cubs teeter on the edge of life and death. All because of the greed of adults.
<Three-line summary
ㅇThe investigator kills the cubs of another male. This is to stop the female from lactating and make her ‘fertile’ again. ‘Infanticide’ is also found among rats and monkeys.
ㅇLangur