Maybe baboon society and human society ain’t that different – both have a similar hierarchy that operates by dominance by aggressive few at the top who get to dump their stress onto those below.

“Every male knows where he stands in society,
who can torture him, who he can torture,
and who the torturee can torture.”

Prof Robert Sapolsky thinks we can learn a lot from baboons. He ought to know, he’s been studying them for four decades.

This is an segment of the excellent documentary documentary Stress: Portrait of a killer and looks at what happens when all the alpha-males in a troop of baboons die because they won the fight to eat meat from a dump that turned out to be poisonous….

See for  yourself what happens…

Related

• Stress – portrait of a killer https://recoverynetworktoronto.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/stress-portrait-of-a-killer/