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As it turns out, chimpanzees make pretty good doctors. , scientists have been studying what chimpanzees do when they fall ill. This search has led to the identification of medicinal behavior, which often involves the ingestion of plants with that can help the animal's recovery.

My team's in the Budongo Forest of western Uganda found its chimpanzees show a range of health care behaviors—one of which, applying chewed botanical material to wounds, had never before been documented in chimpanzees.

Previous studies have shown that wild chimpanzees appear to treat their wounds and maintain sexual hygiene using medicinal plants found in their environment. What's more, they treat other group members, even ones who are unrelated to them.

In 2022, a study in Gabon, West Africa, found that wild chimpanzees to their wounds as well as the wounds of non-kin community members. A had reported that chimpanzees in the Kibale Forest of Uganda occasionally dab the wounds of unrelated group members with leaves.

Now , published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, shows the chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest engaging in topical health care, both on themselves and others.

To figure out whether the Budongo chimpanzees practice first aid, we combed through more than three decades of hand-written observations from field staff and researchers who have worked in this forest, and searched video archives by Budongo primatologists. We also headed into the field to collect eight months of our own behavioral data. The aim: to accumulate all the cases we could find of external health care behavior and see if a pattern emerged.

What we found surprised us. The Budongo chimpanzees appear to have quite a diverse behavioral toolkit for tending to their own wounds and maintaining hygiene in the wild. This behavior ranges from simple actions like wound licking, to more complicated behavior such as applying plant material to an injury.

In some cases, chimpanzees dabbed their open wounds with leaves. In rarer cases, they chewed up plant material (like leaves or stem bark) and applied it directly to the affected area with their mouths. Similar behavior was shown in 2024.

But these chimpanzees don't limit their self-care to treating wounds. We recorded them freeing themselves from wire snares set by hunters, and cleaning their genitals with leaves after mating. In one notable case documented in the forest's logbook from 2009, a chimpanzee wiped herself with a leaf after defecating.

We also wanted to determine which plants the Budongo chimpanzees were selecting. We discovered that some of these plants, such as Alchornea floribunda and a species of Acalypha, have and chemical properties related to wound-healing or infection prevention. Whether this is a coincidence, or an indicator that chimpanzees can identify medicinal plants helpful for wound care, is a question for future research.

Chimpanzee doctors

Buried in logbooks and video archives, we also found seven cases of chimpanzees providing health care for others in their community. Even more interesting, the demographics of the providers and receivers of this health care varied dramatically—occurring between both genetically related and unrelated chimpanzees.

Our study includes cases of chimpanzees licking each other's wounds and applying plant material to the wounds of injured group members. This kind of wound care, directed toward others, is considered "prosocial" as it offers no obvious or immediate benefit to the caregiver. In fact, this kind of direct interaction with the wounds of others can pose risks for the caregiver, exposing them to infectious pathogens or infections.

As far as we know, this is the first time prosocial wound care has been reported among chimpanzees in the Budongo forest reserve. We also noted cases in which chimpanzees helped free others from nylon snares, and one case in which a female wiped the genitals of a male in her group with leaves after mating.

Our findings add this site to the of altruistic health care has been observed among non-kin, advancing our understanding of chimpanzees' capacity for .

Survival of the kindest?

Chimpanzees are often painted , Machiavellian and self-interested, especially in comparison to their peace-loving bonobo cousins. But it appears that these highly social animals have a softer side.

Chimpanzees are not the only animals who have been observed administering first aid to others. Recently, that mice help pull the tongues out of the mouths of unconscious cage companions, clearing their air passages. The caregiver mice were more likely to do this if they were familiar with the incapacitated mouse.

Even from sub-Saharan Africa infected wounds with self-generated antibiotic secretions.

Non-human health care may take different forms, but it appears that animals throughout the animal kingdom can administer first aid to themselves and others. It may not be such a dog-eat-dog world after all.

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