Greetingsbehaviour

In 1976 I was a a master student in Biology under the mentorship of Frans at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands. A group of students were monitoring the behaviour of the group of chimps in the Zoo. It was very special that the chimps were not kept individual in cages but were held on an island in a group to be able to behave as in the wild. Due to my professor Jan van Hoof this was the first experimental wildlike situation for apes in the Netherlands. We students would wander lots of hours , commenting in our portable recorders, alongside the canal that surrounded the island. My topic was to study the behaviour of greeting another member of the group. Because the main topic of Frans was to study the interrelationship and the way power was expressed in the group it was likely that the way of greeting another was part of this powerplay. Frans was one year older than me and in most cases than the other students. There was no powerplay from Frans. Accessible, nice but wise. I have learned a lot from him and I am so sorry that he had to leave this world so soon. Not only my perspective of animals has changed but fortunatly the perspective of an awful lot of members of our world. Claudia Roskam