TOM EATON: Please don't click on this article because of the headline
'We don't compulsively follow the news because we want to know what's happening in the US or Syria. We follow it because we need to touch and be touched by other apes.'
THE other day I sat watching a small troop of baboons, and it got me thinking about journalists and editors who write clickbait headlines. The apes were resting in the shade after a long morning of babooning. A couple of pre-teens threw themselves around in a tree, a Circe de Soleil version of tag, but nobody paid them any attention. It was time to relax. And that meant it was time to groom. At first, their touch seemed casual and mechanical. Fingers poked around in fur, fishing out critters and seeds that were popped into mouths with unthinking haste. But as it went on and on, as repetitive and lightly engaged as a meditation, it revealed its true purpose. This wasn't a group of apes pulling ticks off each other. This was a clan, affirming its togetherness. Long after they'd picked one another clean, they continued to touch and stroke, to tease out tangles, to part fur, earnestly and carefully, that they had already combed. They soothed and reassured.There is a delightful theory, m...
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