Wild Things

Chimps Hate Drones, Too

Not long ago, drones were having a moment—a good one. Now it’s hard to see them as anything other than what they are: at best the harmless-but-annoying whirring toys of amateur cinematographers, and at worst, well, ruthlessly efficient unmanned killing machines.

Now it seems as if that frustration with UAVs has evolved into something that spans species. Take the video above, for instance. In it, a quadcopter is flying over the Royal Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands, its camera recording the zoo-related sights and sounds from above. We see an elephant, tiger, and bear in all their captive glory before moving into the chimpanzee enclosure. It’s here that the cross-species drone rage comes to a head.

Either upset by how close it flew to its personal space, bored, or in protest of the human race’s growing obsession with unmanned aerial vehicles, a tool-using chimp immediately reaches out and bats the copter clear out of the sky with a stick. It’s not only an incredibly satisfying moment in primate-human relations, it also proves, once and for all, the depths of our shared DNA.