Monkeys Mourn the Death of a Robot Baby Monkey in BBC Wildlife Series

January 8, 2017 7:14 PM

A CHIMP adopting a pet kitten and a family of monkeys mourning the death of a robot baby are some of the scenes captured in a BBC wildlife series filmed by remote-controlled animals. Spy In The Wild has been shot using replica animals with cameras hidden inside. Scientists and show producers were amazed when a group of langur monkeys in India mistook a robot baby for one of their family. And when the cyber monkey was accidentally dropped from a height, they were plunged into grief and began hugging each other for comfort
posted by grobertson (21 comments total)

forgive us
posted by Foci for Analysis at 7:23 PM on January 8, 2017 [9 favorites]

This doesn't seem very surprising. Animals have all kinds of intense feelings and emotions. I feel like we as humans underestimate them far too often. I'm sorry that they had to experience this distress.
posted by Fizz at 7:24 PM on January 8, 2017 [12 favorites]

What the actual hell.

Every piece of research I do on wild animals - purely observational research, for which I am not interacting with the animals in any way other than sitting below them and watching through binoculars, and then collecting their feces when it falls - is put through a rigorous ethical review board to make sure that I am not harming or distressing the animals in any way.

This is meaningless, mindless, heartless manipulation of intelligent animals to draw eyeballs to attempt to show things which we have already observed and published on. There's lots of research about what happens in Hanuman langur societies when infants are killed (infanticide is fairly common). There are many published observations of "mourning" and "grief." There are published observations of "adoption" by adult male chimpanzees, both of young chimps, and of other animals.

This is cruel, unscientific, and certainly doesn't seem to have been conducted with the welfare of the primates being "tricked" at its heart. People justify wildlife documentaries like this by arguing that it's all for conservation - well, what conservation purpose does this serve? What are we learning that is new, exciting, or worthwhile?
posted by ChuraChura at 7:30 PM on January 8, 2017 [66 favorites]

People justify wildlife documentaries like this by arguing that it's all for conservation - well, what conservation purpose does this serve? What are we learning that is new, exciting, or worthwhile?

I won't speak to the ethics, but it is true that it's a lot easier to galvanize public opinion about things when there's emotionally affecting video.

I don't know what the public is supposed to be galvanized about here, but I can see a general argument to getting people to care about destruction of habitats or medical testing or climate change or any of the other myriad things we all know to care about intellectually, but can't quite feel much about until we see something that kicks us in the heartstrings.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:42 PM on January 8, 2017 [7 favorites]

Man, when the chimps and the robots finally get together and organize...we are fucked.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:52 PM on January 8, 2017 [8 favorites]

Well, we'll probably have earned it.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:42 PM on January 8, 2017 [5 favorites]

Hang on - I think the robot baby falling over was accidental. These aren't robots sent in to trick animals or manipulate them into doing anything, it's more like a camoflauge thing - they have a camera inside the robotic whatever so that they can stick it in the middle of the flock or troop or pride or herd or what have you and get footage with as little hint of "hey, I think there's humans involved here in some fashion" as possible. It's not a case where "let's program a baby monkey robot to fall off a cliff and see it makes the other monkeys sad". It was more "let's make a baby monkey robot and put a camera inside its head so it can be sitting around there and getting footage - oh shit, one of the other monkeys just knocked it over."

An earlier documentary in this series got focused on penguins.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:52 PM on January 8, 2017 [26 favorites]

The comments..................................
posted by FallowKing at 9:10 PM on January 8, 2017

You can flag the trolls. Don't know if it'll do any good.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:24 PM on January 8, 2017

Don't know if it'll do any good.

When does it ever?
posted by aramaic at 10:07 PM on January 8, 2017

One would hope that the Express would remove them.

Just checked: one would be wrong.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:37 PM on January 8, 2017

One would hope that the Express would remove them.

It's one of the worst newspapers in the UK. When it's not peddling conspiracy theories about the EU, it's promising its (elderly) readership that a cure for Alzheimer's/cancer is around the corner.
posted by mushhushshu at 12:15 AM on January 9, 2017 [9 favorites]

My sole knowledge about the Express is my facebook feed being flooded with ironically-shared Express articles worrying about chemtrails. Also UFO's. (Until I learned how to use "see less posts like this").
posted by sourcejedi at 12:28 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

It's instructive to think about how humans would have reacted to the best robot baby we can build today in, say, the fifth century. This stuff is genuinely weird, and it's mainly our exposure that inoculates us to it's strangeness.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:17 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

For the non-Brits, The Express is pretty much the same as the Daily Mail. So I won't be clicking on this link, thanks.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:34 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]

For the non-Brits, The Express is pretty much the same as the Daily Mail. So I won't be clicking on this link, thanks.

Cheers, thanks a lot, useful info.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:08 AM on January 9, 2017

Here are a couple of higher-quality journalism pieces. One will note the absence of focus on robot baby death, though they do note it as part of the larger story.

The Guardian: BBC series uses robot creatures to document secret lives of animals

The Telegraph: BBC robot animals to go undercover to film nature even David Attenborough cannot reach. From that piece: Programme-makers admitted sending the finished creatures into their new families was “quite nerve-wracking”, with concerns about upsetting the natural order of families. I do agree it would have been good for them to take those concerns a bit further though – they assumed the robots could be destroyed, and they hoped they would be accepted, so it wouldn't have been too hard to put together "what might happen if one is destroyed after it's been accepted."
posted by fraula at 4:55 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]

I hate to break it to you all, but David Bowie was actually a robot built by the BBC to film us for a longitudinal documentary series.
posted by briank at 5:10 AM on January 9, 2017 [8 favorites]

Yeah, for context I have to think through a number of hypotheticals when putting together my project for the review board, such as when I would take a group out of my study (I said if my presence made them more vulnerable to poaching, if disease transmission became a concern, things like that). It's certainly not hard to imagine that this might be a thing that occurs given the research already showing behavior like this, and it's frustrating that the only thing they could think to do was ... continue to take high quality video footage for their show.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:44 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think I saw a clip from this on Facebook, but I assumed that the show was called Harrassing Tigers With Drones.

To adapt an old joke:

If you're fairly reactionary, you start out in life with the Sun. Then you retire, and you switch to reading the Daily Mail. Then, eventually, you die, and switch your allegiance to the Daily Express.
posted by Grangousier at 6:25 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]

You know, you're not supposed to read the comments like, ever, especially on rags like the Express, but in this case, since the topic is primatology, I thought I'd bite the bullet and look for human-like behavior.

Result: nope. There's a lot of shit slinging, teeth baring and chest thumping, but nothing approaching Homo Sapiens (or Habilis, Neanderthalensis, etc.) intelligence, empathy or communication skills.

Maybe we should try sending in robot baby wingnuts?
posted by signal at 7:12 AM on January 9, 2017 [5 favorites]