Infanticide is easiest to understand when it involves killing the offspring of others [1], but a parent may also kill its own offspring if the sacrifice of currently dependent young leads to higher survival of brood mates [2] or an improvement in the parent's likely future reproduction [3]. However, sex-specific infanticide by parents of their own offspring, although occurring in some human soc...

This study examined the play behaviour in one group of coatis (Nasua narica) at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. We incidentally found adult males playing with juvenile coatis, and conducted post-hoc analyses to investigate this interaction. Coati groups consist of adult females and juveniles of both sexes until male juveniles reach two years of age and leave the band to become solita...

We report a case of infanticide of a 4-month-old infant boy by starvation and dehydration. The parents were both charged with murder. The mother suffered from schizoaffective disorder, and the father was diagnosedwith shared psychotic disorder (folie à deux) by forensic assessment (T.R.). We describe the couple’s history, including a summary of their delusional beliefs, based on police reports,...

The concept of a right to life has received a great deal of attention recently, chiefly because it figures so prominently in many arguments con~ cerning a wide variety of moral issues. Arguments concerning the morality of abortion, capital punish­­ ment, infanticide, famine relief, and animal consumption and experimenta­­ tion, for instance, frequently invoke th is con cept, so cia rity about i...

November 2005, Vol. 95, No. 11 SAMJ Uncertainty as to the cause or causes of sudden and unexpected infant death and difficulty in excluding the possibility of infanticide, even after the performance of a ‘complete’ autopsy, was graphically illustrated in the London courts recently. A mother wrongly convicted of killing her two sons had her conviction quashed, and the eminent paediatrician who h...

A 30-year-old woman who simulated a psychosis and threatened to commit infanticide and suicide was forcibly admitted to an acute psychiatric unit under the Mental Health Act. She was discharged an hour later after confessing that she had feigned illness. In this article we discuss the subject of feigned illness (malingering) and its clinical aspects in the acute psychiatric setting. Early recog...

Sometimes, though rarely, we find symptoms of opium poisoning, specially in children who have lived for a few days, and theoretically it is possible to find symptoms of any other poison, but practically we see that these things are rarely used for infanticide, as almost all of them produce a certain amount of torture which the unhappy mothers do not wish to see. It is very rare also to find inj...

Lactating female baboons, Papio cynocephalusoften maintain close associations with particular males. There are at least three proposed benefits of 'friendships' to females: (1) male protection against potentially infanticidal males; (2) male protection against harassment by dominant females; (3) male attachment to an infant that develops into future care of juveniles. These hypotheses were exam...

Alpha male chacma baboons experience uncontested access to individual estrus females. Consequently, alpha male paternity certainty is high and underpins significant levels of infanticide by immigrant males that, in turn, has selected for male defense of infants. There is also, however, a high probability that alpha males will be absent during the period when their own offspring are vulnerable, ...

In many species, females have evolved behavioral strategies to reduce the risk of infanticide. For instance, polyandry can create paternity confusion that inhibits males from killing offspring they could have sired. Here, the authors propose that females could socially obtain the same benefits by nesting communally. Singly sired litters could be perceived as a large multiply sired litter once p...