Meerkats Top The List Of The Mammals That Would Likely Kill Their Own Kind

Surprisingly, these cute creatures, the meerkats, are known as having the most violent behavior and dubbed as the most murder murderous mammal known to science that would likely kill their own kind. Yes, they would kill their own breed just to be of dominance.

The study was published in the journal Nature. It was led by Dr. Jose Maria Gomez from the University of Granada in Spain and colleagues. The researchers examined over 4 million deaths among 1,024 mammal species. They compared them with the results of 600 studies of violence among humans from the prehistoric times up to the present, according to NPR.

The results showed that some incidence of violence in humans is attributed to human's place on the evolutionary tree. Another shocking finding is that meerkats are murderous and destructive.

In the list of the mammals that would likely kill their own kind, meerkats rank first with a rate of almost 19.4 percent of all deaths. They are followed by the red-tailed monkey, blue monkey, red-fronted lemur, mongoose lemur, black lemur, New Zealand lion, long-tailed marmot and lion, respectively.

According to Independent, meerkats live in the Kalahari and Namib deserts in southern Africa. It is known for infanticide, which is a crime of killing a child or creature within a year of birth. In a 2006 study, National Geographic featured meerkat mothers as killing the offspring of other female meerkats to maintain dominance.

Dr. Gomez said that it is surprising that a priori cute and pacific animals, like meerkats, marmots and ground squirrels, have high levels of mortality to conspecifics (members of the same species). The study was also conducted to aid the researchers in knowing the rate of intentional killing among humans when Homo sapiens first evolved, which is about two percent. This was more than six times greater than the average among the 1,024 mammal species, which is just 0.3 percent.