Mammals ruins viewers' dinners with 'barbaric' chimpanzee scenes

What did you miss?

Like anything fronted by Sir David Attenborough, his new series Mammals has featured plenty of the uncomfortable carnage of the natural world. This week's final episode, focusing on forests, went straight into it with a shocking scene of chimpanzees hunting.

But the most harrowing thing about this particular hunt was that this was primate-on-primate violence, with the chimpanzees attacking and eating small monkeys. We've seen orcas on the attack and bunnies mauled at Easter, but this felt even more grotesque.

Who, what and why?

Attenborough lulled viewers into a false sense of security by showing chimpanzees in the forests of Equatorial Africa searching for honey in beehives. However, things took a turn for the gory when the chimps who couldn't get to the honey started eyeing up red-capped mangabeys in the trees.

"The alpha male investigates. Others stay on the ground and get ahead of the mangabeys. And then some quietly climb into the trees. The trap is set," Attenborough explained.

He added: "The leader charges. Some hunters return to the forest floor to prevent their prey from coming to the ground. In panic, the monkeys flee, directly towards the chimps waiting in ambush. And are caught."

The human beings watching, however, struggled to make it through their own food given the violence on show in Mammals. On social media, they said the scenes were "barbaric" and "close to cannibalism".

In the wake of the successful hunt, Attenborough said: "The chimps, young and old, females and males, all share in the feast. Teamwork has won, and is rewarded."

Just to hammer the point home, Mammals showed plenty of footage of the chimps tearing chunks off the smaller creatures and passing them around the troop. As is so often the case when it comes to Attenborough docs, this showed the genius and the brutality of nature all in one go.

What else happened on Mammals?

This episode of Mammals focused particularly on the unique ways that animals are having to deal with man-made changes to their environments. The doc showed lions and tigers hunting in very unusual ways, as well as howler monkeys risking death on power lines in order to get enough food for their families.

There was also a new breakout star of the nature documentary world as Mammals viewers fell in love with the tiny and adorable Siberian squirrel, which is able to glide through the air. It was a dramatic and fascinating conclusion to the series.

Read more:

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• Mammals viewers want sperm whale footage to win all the awards

• Jeremy Clarkson criticises David Attenborough's focus on climate change