Humans keep animals as pets. That’s not a trait completely unique to us, but it is rare, and it makes a certain evolutionary sense that one of the only other groups that dabble in pet ownership would be our fellow primates.
According to a new study published in the journal Primates, as detailed by Popular Science, researchers at the University of Oxford argue that monkeys and apes can and do forge relationships with other species. They aren’t exactly pets per se, but close enough.
The review aggregated 303 documented cases from scientific literature, surveys of 66 primatologists, and dozens of media reports, some of which you likely read before or saw shared as a cute story via Instagram Reel. In a sense, the team amassed the world’s most comprehensive collection of cute animal friends stories the world has ever seen. A Library of Alexandria for stuff your aunts and coworkers share in group chats. Monkeys playing with pigs, white-cheeked gibbons caring for mice, capuchin monkeys raising baby marmosets. The stuff so saccharine that you can get a cavity just watching it.
Animals Interact With Their Pets the Same Way Humans Do
The researchers found patterns that sound familiar to the way humans interact with the animals we care for. Young primates were the most likely to play with other species, while adult females were more likely to groom and care for them. Most interactions happened between closely related species, probably because even though they weren’t the same, there was enough overlap.
While some of the interactions ended tragically, a lot of them offered no obvious survival advantage for the animal pet owner, suggesting to the researchers that the behavior might stem from curiosity and social instincts instead of self-interest. In other words, they wanted a pet companion for no other reason than they wanted a pet companion, just like how most people don’t get a cat for its rodent control abilities. They get a cat because they like cats.
The researchers stop short of calling these animals pet owners, because that is a rather lofty title to bestow upon a behavior we don’t fully understand yet. But they argue that these behaviors could represent the evolutionary building blocks of human-animal companionship. The desire to adopt a cute furry little buddy might not be unique to us. It could exist in other primates; it just hasn’t fully evolved yet.
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