A Baboon Carries her Dead Baby

A chacma baboon female (Papio ursinus), named Ms. Close, carries her dead first born baby. It is not unusual for female baboons to do this, but what surprised me in this case was that she carried it for six days! There’s been a lot of speculation on why baboons do this, and no one has given any convincing reason. My guess is that even though her baby is dead, she still considered it as her baby to be cared for, and she did so until it became a shriveled sack of skin and lost its look of a baby. I’m not sure what the cause of death was. I saw that the baby was very weak one morning and was dead not long afterward.