Communities provide their members with both safety and freedom. Safety can come in different forms – it can mean having enough food and shelter, or it can mean being protected from attack by enemies. And with this safety in the community comes freedom – the freedom to grow and develop within the community, and the freedom to share and connect openly with other members of the same community. The two functions, creating safety and giving freedom, are important both to human communities and to communities of the animal world.
The social groups that chimpanzees live in are actually known as “communities” and are very similar to human communities in many ways. Within large groups of up to 120 members, most, if not all of the chimps know each other. They choose, however, to eat, sleep, and travel together in much smaller groups of up to six chimps.
Feeling safe is important for the chimp community. Each community has a leader – the strongest male of the group – and protection is active. They do not wait to be attacked. Instead, male chimps guard the community by constantly walking around the area where they live, keeping watch for potential danger. Freedom within the chimpanzee society can be found at the large social meetings they have. These are very social events, and the chimps are safe and free to play and enjoy their security within the community.
Zebras are also community-oriented; they are very social and live in groups. The organization of these groups does, however, depend on the particular type of zebra, with some having longer lasting social connections than others.
Zebras from the mountains and plains live in social family groups or in groups of single males.
Safety is an important function of the group. When attacked, the zebra community gathers together into a tight group with the young in the middle, protected by the others. The male leader of the group will then try to frighten off the attackers.
Penguin communities are large, with members numbering over 1,000 in some groups. The communities generally do not have a particular leader, and they are very social. Living surrounded by so many others leads to a strong social connection between members and there is a lot of interaction between them. The saying “strength in numbers” also applies to the large penguin communities as they help each other to survive the difficult conditions in which they live. One example of this is the way they “huddle,” or move very close together to protect each other.
Across both the human and the animal worlds, we see similar key elements of community – roles for individual members and rules to make sure the community functions in an orderly way. Living within these communities gives its members the rewards of both safety and freedom.