&gt; So Dutton and his staff anesthetized her to figure out what was going on. An exploratory surgery revealed a tumour in her uterus that had spread to the abdominal wall. It was terminal, Dutton said, so they euthanized her on the operating room table on Dec. 5, 2014.<p>&gt; “You have to let their natural behaviour happen,” Franke said. “They have to sort it out. In the wild, a lot of times it’s to the death.”<p>Which makes me wonder how things would have played out had they not euthanized the current matriarch. Would she have lived long enough to allow her oldest daughter to mature? Would have there been other behaviors&#x2F;rituals the baboons would have gone through because they would have seen the matriarch pass naturally?<p>Edit: grammar