A clip from the Nature documentary “Murder in the Troop.”

Before June of last year I didn’t particularly like baboons. They seemed to be aggressive, ill-tempered monkeys that more often provoked a small sense of revulsion in me than curiosity. (In fact, for most of my life I thought primates were pretty boring; didn’t they just sit around eating leaves and picking ticks off each other?) Then I happened to pick up Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir and that all changed. There was so much I didn’t know about them and by the time I put down Sapolsky’s book I had an interest and affection for them that I could not have predicted.

Coincidentally I would take an