Chimpanzees’ first-aid kit is each other!
In 2021, a group of researchers observing chimpanzees in Uganda, a country in East Africa, found that chimps sometimes give first aid to each other. This suggests that chimps might be able to think about how to help others as well as themselves.
Since chimpanzees are one of the animal species most related to humans, the group of researchers has carefully studied the lives of chimpanzees in different ways. This is important because chimps are related to humans and we tend to each other. This would mean that chimpanzees can probably do most of the things we humans can do.
Additionally, Dr. Elodie Freymann, an ethologist, went to Uganda to study the chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest. She was interested in learning more about the methods the chimpanzees used to help one another. Dr. Freymann discovered that chimps eat certain plants, using them as medicine.
Furthermore, the ethologist said, the chimpanzees “chew the plants up, and then apply the chewed material to the open injury.”
On top of that, Dr. Freymann found that chimpanzees can be found licking a wound or cleaning themselves with leaves. Licking an injury can help remove dirt and other small particles that make it hard for it to heal. What’s even more interesting is that the saliva of a few chimps can have chemicals that help keep a wound from getting infected. The leaves of some plants can do this as well.
The seven cases the team of researchers found of chimpanzees helping out other chimpanzees seem to show that chimpanzees may be able to tell when another chimpanzee needs help. It’s unusual and unlikely for animals to help another injured animal.
In one case, a teenage male chimpanzee was sucking on the leg of another young male, helping to clean a wound.
Some of the chimps who helped others weren’t even related. For instance, a male chimpanzee was seen to help an unrelated female chimp escape from a rope trap that had caught her.
One huge question for the ethologists is how much of this behavior comes from the chimpanzees’ natural instincts, and how much is learned from other older chimps.
An example of chimpanzees learning from other older chimps is this: an adult female chewed a leaf to put on her wound. The chimp’s daughter saw this and then did the exact same thing, chewing up a leaf and putting it on her mother’s injury. So, some behaviors come from instinct, but others seem so complicated that they’re probably learned.
Therefore, observations of chimps providing medical care to others demonstrate a level of cognitive and social complication often underestimated in non-human animals. This behavior, along with self-medication instances, suggests a evidential understanding of the ability to act for others, challenging simplistic views of animal behavior.
Sources:
https://newsforkids.net/articles/2025/06/04/chimps-perform-first-aid-on-each-other/