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Shirley C. Strum

Shirley C. Strum (born Sept. 11, 1947) is a primate scientist, conservationist and author. As a graduate student in 1972, she initiated a study of olive baboons (Papio anubis) in Kenya that is ongoing and among the longest wildlife field studies on record. Her research changed scientific and popular perceptions of baboons by testing assumptions about the male and female dominance hierarchies, male aggression, baboon social behavior, and the baboon mind. Strum became convinced that baboons think tactically and possess the ability to make good and even bad decisions -- ideas once viewed as unorthodox, now considered mainstream. She is a professor in the Graduate Division, School of Social Sciences, at U.C. San Diego, and teaches each spring. She lives primarily in Kenya, where she remains an active director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project.

Biography

Strum was born in Stuttgart, Germany, to parents who survived the Nazi concentration camps. She is an only child. When she was 5 years old, the family relocated to San Diego as naturalized U.S. citizens. In 1965, Strum enrolled at U.C. Berkeley, where a lecture course taught by anthropologist, Sherwood Washburn, “the father of modern primatology,” inspired her to pursue a career in primate science. Washburn became a mentor, while Phyllis Dolhinow served as her thesis advisor.  

Upon qualifying for the PhD in 1976 – Science magazine featured findings from her thesis on baboon hunting -- Strum was hired by U.C. San Diego and began dividing time between classroom and field work in Kenya. In 1983, she married David “Jonah” Western, known for his conservation work in the larger Amboseli ecosystem. In 2001, Strum underwent an aggressive surgical procedure to fix a debilitating back problem which had threatened to end her career in the field.

Research

Strum watched gibbons and patas monkeys at the Berkeley field station prior to starting her field study of the “Pumphouse Gang” of olive baboons at Kekopey, Kenya, in 1972. She set out to test whether baboons conformed to the male-centric “baboon model” and might serve as proxies for the earliest stage of human evolution.   They did not conform. The male hierarchy proved dynamic, not stable, as expected. She also observed social strategies, used by both males and females, to offset aggression. For example, a male might recruit an infant baboon to act as living shield to avert aggression from a rival, a behavior called agonistic buffering.

In early 1970s, Strum discovered what she terms “complexity” in baboon society, a concept that includes social strategies of competition and defense, social negotiations, a baboon version of the “golden rule,” baboon actions that build trust, dynamism in the male dominance hierarchy, and evidence of baboon “mind.” In 1976, what was then the Gilgil Baboon Project became “long-term.”

In the early ‘80s, Kenyan farmers settled in the baboons’ home range. Baboons targeted field crops and human-wildlife conflict resulted. Strum recognized the situation as an early symptom of the then-nascent biodiversity crisis and added ecology to her study of baboon behavior. She phased out graduate student assistants in favor of local Kenyans, who proved adept with community relations as well as data collection. Despite Strum’s efforts to stop crop raiding and improve prospects for the farmers (1981-84), conflict persisted and was often lethal to the baboons. This led to her scientific translocation of three baboon troops in 1984, the first of its kind. Trapped and sedated, 132 animals were transported by truck roughly 100 miles to the Laikipia Plateau. There, Strum studied how baboons adapt to a place with unfamiliar food resources, harsher weather and animals they’d never encountered, including elephants. Strum’s first book, Almost Human (Random House, 1987; U. of Chicago Press, 2001) recounts her early research and the translocation.

Strum’s approach combined quantitative data with descriptive “natural history,” borrowed, she later realized, from Darwin. This unorthodox method allowed her to put behavior and events in ecologic and historic context. One such event was the spread, first noted by Strum in 2000, of an imported prickly pear cactus species (Opuntia stricta). Across two decades, she tracked the cactus “invasion” and its impact on the baboons -- who competed for its fruit -- giving equal weight to “process” and “outcome.” After decades of close observation, Strum felt she had gleaned an understanding of, in her words, “what baboons really are.” She revisited human origins and began to question assumptions about evolutionary theory, notably “survival of the fittest.” Strum’s latest book, Echoes of Our Origins (Johns Hopkins Press, 2025) retrospectively recaps her decades of field work, describes recent findings, and reflects on science, nature, mind, evolution and the implications of traits shared by humans and baboons.  

Media

In addition to her scientific studies and trade books, Strum has written for popular magazines such as National Geographic, aiming to improve the baboon’s reputation. Strum has also appeared in 25 natural history documentaries, starting with Survival Anglia’s “Shirley Strum and the Pumphouse Gang” and including, most recently, “The Secret Life of Animals,” a BBC production available on Apple+. Others are “Trials of Life” (BBC), “Monkey Business” (Canadian Broadcast Company), “Among the Baboons” (National Geographic Explorer), and the award-winning “Baboon Tales,” a joint venture between Tamarin Productions, Discovery USA and Discovery Canada.

Conservation and Community Involvement

Strum’s husband, David Western, pioneered community-based conservation (CBC) in the 1960s.  Her conservation work is based on Western’s approach: “If people are part of the problem, then people have to be part of the solution.” Strum began employing local Kenyans in 1981, has helped build community schools since 1983, and developed ecotourism with the Maasai women of the Twala Cultural Manyatta. The latter effort earned her the honorific “Mama Twala,” the mother of Twala. Her 1984 translocation of 132 baboons established primate translocation as a conservation and management tool.

Collaborations

In the 1980s, Strum and the French philosopher Bruno Latour began a collaboration that lasted until his death in 2022. Latour’s Actor Network Theory emerged from watching and discussing the differences between baboons and humans. Latour inspired Strum to take a 10-year detour into Science Studies, focusing on the scientific process. A 1976 Wenner-Gren International Symposium organized by Strum (Baboon Models and Muddles) failed to produce a publication because participants balked at being studied, as proposed, by Latour. However, 20 years later, another Wenner-Gren International Symposium (Changing Images of Primate Societies: The role of theory, method, and gender), at Teresopolis, Brazil, co-hosted by Linda Fedigan, engendered cooperation between those who study primates and those who study scientists. The results were published in Primate Encounters: models of Science, Gender, and Society (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Selected Publications

1975  "Life with the Pumphouse Gang: new insights into baboon behavior." National Geographic Magazine 147: 762-691.

1975  "Primate predation: Interim report on the development of a tradition in a troop of olive baboons." Science 187: 755-757.

1976  "Primate predation and bioenergetics:  a reply." Science 191:  314-317.

1978  "Dominance hierarchy and social organization: strong or weak inference?" Wenner-Gren Conference:  Baboon Field Research: Myths and Models, June 1978.

1981  "Baboons: social strategists par excellence." Wildlife News 16:  2-6.

1982 "Agonistic dominance in male baboons:  an alternative view." International Journal of Primatology 3: 175-202.

1983 "Use of females by male olive baboons."  American Journal of Primatology 5:93-109.

1983 "Baboon cues for eating meat." Journal of Human Evolution 12:  327-336.

1984  "Why males use infants." Primate Paternalism, D. Taub ed., New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,146-185.

1987  "A role for long-term primate field research in source countries." Primate Ecology and Conservation: Proceedings of the Tenth Congress of Primatology Vol. 2, J. Else and P. Lee, eds., Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 215-220.

1987  "Activist conservation--the human factor in primate conservation in source countries." Primate Ecology and Conservation: Proceedings of the Tenth Congress of Primatology Vol. 2, J. Else and P. Lee, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 369-382.

1987  Almost Human: a journey into the world of baboons. New York: Random House.

1987 "The Gang moves to a strange new land." National Geographic 172: 677-690.

1987 "Translocation of three troops of baboons in Kenya: An Update." International Journal of Primatology 8: 426.

1988 "Social strategies and primate psychology." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 264-265.

1991 "Weight and age in wild olive baboons."  American Journal of Primatology 25: 219-237.

1993  "Reconciling aggression and social manipulation as means of competition, Part 1: Life history perspective."  International Journal of Primatology 915: 739-765.

1994 "Prospects for management of primate pests." Commensal Primates, Sylvan Biquand and J.P. Gautier, eds Revue d'Ecologie (Terre Vie) 49: 295-306.

1999  Introduction. The New Physical Anthropology. S.C. Strum, D. Lindburg and D. Hamburg, eds, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, xiii-xv.

2005 "Measuring success in primate translocation: a baboon case study." American Journal of Primatology, 65:117-140.

2010  "The development of primate raiding: implications for primate management and conservation." International Journal of Primatology 31:133-156.

2010 "Skills as non-material artifacts: learning from baboons.” Coping with the Past: creative perspective on conservation and restoration. P. Gagliardi, B. Latour and P Memelsdorff (eds.)  Firenze, Leo S. Olschki Press. pp 206. Chapter 4, pg 71-81.

2012  “Darwin’s monkey: why baboons can’t become human." Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 55:3-23.

2019  “Why Natural History is Important to (Primate) Science: a baboon case study.” International Journal of Primatology 40:596-612. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-019-00117-7

2020  “Lessons for the Anthropocene from the Socio-ecological World of Baboons.” A Book on the Body Politic, Bruno Latour, Simon Shaffer and Pasquale Gagliardi, eds; Chapter 12: 239-262. Fondazione Giorgi Cini: Venice.

2023  "Confessions of a Baboon Watcher: from inside to outside the paradigm."  Primates https://doi.org/s10329-023-01060-1.

2025  Echoes of Our Origins: baboons, humans, nature. Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2025.