A male chimpanzee with his eye on alpha status will set aside his usual indifference to infants and go around tickling them, the better to curry favour with their mothers. The vote-winning tactic, variations of which will be on display in town halls everywhere in this super-election year, is one of the many examples of social strategy that the Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal documented in his half-century of observing non-human primates.
De Waal, who has died aged 75, was not afraid to make the comparison with humans explicit. He could be counted on to highlight the ape in us, from George W Bush’s “bipedal swagger” to the White House press secretary Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes from reporters and Donald Trump prowling behind Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate. He did so decades before it was fashionable.
