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What Do Animals Understand About Death?
The Virginia opossum, according to John Smith—that explorer of all things Virginia—“hath a head like a Swine, & a taile like a Rat, and is of the Bignes of a Cat.” Had Smith looked closer, he might have discovered that it also has opposable thumbs, fifty teeth (more than any other land mammal except the equally improbable giant armadillo), and, if female, thirteen nipples, which are arranged like a clockface, with twelve in a circle and one in the middle. These nipples are concealed inside a pouch on its belly, because the Virginia opossum is a marsupial, the only one native to North America.
All this is strange, but none of it is as strange as the behavior for which this possum is most famous: playing possum. Contrary to what you might imagine, that does not simply entail curling up and holding still. A possum that is playing possum keels over to one side, its tongue hanging out, its eyes open and unblinking. Saliva drips from its mouth while its other end leaks urine and feces, together with a putrescent green goop. Its body temperature and heart rate drop, its breathing becomes almost imperceptible, and its tongue turns blue. If, in a fit of sadism or scientific experimentation, you cut off its tail while it is in this state, it will not so much as flinch.
Idiomatically, “playing possum” means “pretending to be dead,” but what exactly playing possum means to a possum is considerably harder to say. Does the possum have any idea what it means to be dead (to say nothing of what it means to pretend)? When it is moved to begin its Oscar-worthy performance, does it know that it is in mortal danger? Does the implacable fact of death have any purchase whatsoever on its possum-y heart? And if it does not—which seems likely, given its unusually small brain—what of all the other creatures that feign death: frogs, snakes, spiders, sharks, swifts? And what of all the other creatures in general? The octopus, the elephant, the great horned owl, the house cat, the giant tortoise, the chimpanzee: who, in all the vast animal kingdom, joins us in having intimations of mortality?
That is the animating question of “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death” (Princeton), a new book by the Spanish writer Susana Monsó. She is not a biologist or a zoologist; she is a philosopher, with a particular interest in the nature of animal minds. And yet, though “Playing Possum” parses with sometimes excruciating precision the possible inner states of an entire menagerie of creatures, it is our own intellectual and emotional condition that haunts its pages. How much, the book implicitly asks, can any living being, human or otherwise, truly grasp about what it means to die?
The field into which Monsó has ventured in “Playing Possum” is known as comparative thanatology—the study of how different species respond to death. This question is not new: “Who can say,” Charles Darwin mused, in “The Descent of Man,” “what cows feel, when they surround and stare intently on a dying or dead companion.” The discipline, however, is very new. Monsó traces its origins to 2008, when sixteen chimpanzees at a rescue center in Cameroon huddled together and watched, in utter, un-chimplike silence, as a deceased member of their cohort was wheeled away. A photograph of the scene, published in National Geographic the following year, triggered an explosion of sympathy and curiosity, both among the general public and among scientists, psychologists, and philosophers who were interested in ascertaining what exactly those seemingly bereft chimps were feeling.
That photo also captured, accidentally, one of the fundamental difficulties with studying what animals understand about death: you have to be there to watch them. In theory, you could conduct all kinds of experiments to help gauge their comprehension, but only if your curiosity is considerably stronger than your moral compass. You could, for instance, present various creatures with decapitated animals that have been stuffed and rigged to move around; you could use hidden speakers to expose mothers to prerecorded audio of their dead babies.
Both experiments have been proposed, although mercifully not performed, overt cruelty and gruesomeness having mostly faded from favor in academic circles. But that leaves comparative thanatology largely reliant on anecdotal evidence—incidents like that of the chimps in Cameroon, witnessed by chance and recorded with varying degrees of accuracy and acuity. Partly as a result of this, and partly because of its emotionally potent subject matter, the field is extremely susceptible to unwarranted anthropomorphic interpretations. Monsó’s goal is to clear this haze of subjectivity from the discipline, using the foremost tool of philosophy: logical rigor. To establish whether animals have any concept of death, she says, we must begin by establishing exactly what a “concept of death” means.
Consider, for instance, the behavior of your average ant. If an ant is trapped in sand, its fellow-ants will attempt to save its life, pulling on its limbs and digging away at the sand to try to free it. And if an ant dies inside its colony, other ants, acting like tiny insect undertakers, will swiftly remove the body, often taking it to a designated location outside the nest. At first, those behaviors seem to suggest that ants understand death, since they react appropriately to both its imminence and its actuality. But in reality the ants are only responding to certain chemicals—in the first case, one that serves as a kind of distress call, and, in the second, ones emitted by a carcass. If you take a live ant and dab those carcass chemicals on it, as E. O. Wilson did in the nineteen-fifties, other ants will treat it as dead and promptly carry it out of the colony, even if the alleged corpse is waving its antennae, resisting its would-be pallbearers, and otherwise displaying every possible sign of life.
The ants, in other words, have no concept of death; their reaction to it is governed solely by instinct. We can recognize such reactions, Monsó explains, because they are automatic, provoked by specific stimuli, and entirely predictable: each individual ant will always react the same way when confronted with death, and every ant will exhibit the same behavior as its peers. By contrast, animals with a concept of death will react to it in ways that are learned rather than instinctive, not rigidly responsive to specific stimuli, and highly variable: the same individual will react differently to different deaths, and different individuals will react differently to the same death.
Cartoon by Drew Dernavich
We should recognize our own species in that sentence. Adult human beings—even the callous, tone-deaf, emotionally immature ones—demonstrate an understanding of death that is remarkable in its sophistication. It incorporates a grasp of, among other things, causality (every death is precipitated by something), universality (all living things must die), personal mortality (that includes us), and unpredictability (although we know we will die, we can’t know exactly when). And that’s before you get to beliefs about the afterlife and expressions of grief and mourning: wearing crêpe, reciting the Kaddish, writing “Hamlet.” The fact that we have such an elaborate concept of death has sometimes been used to argue that other animals can’t possibly have one at all, because to do so would require, say, the ability to comprehend annihilation. But that’s nonsense, Monsó insists. The question isn’t whether animals have anything like a human concept of death; it is whether they have any concept of death at all.
A word of warning: you should not pick up “Playing Possum” expecting a series of heartwarming tales demonstrating the existence of a love stronger than death between animals. If that’s the book you want, it was published back in 2013: “How Animals Grieve,” by the anthropologist Barbara J. King. King makes no claims about whether animals comprehend death, but she does assert that they feel grief—because they care about and bond to one another, “because of a heart’s certainty that another’s presence is as necessary as air.” In support of this hypothesis, she offers touching accounts of responses to death in every corner of the animal kingdom, from the big-brained megafauna (primates, elephants, whales) to the domesticated crowd-pleasers (cats, dogs, horses) to the completely surprising (chickens).
Monsó serves up stories like these, too, but far more sparsely, and with far more scrutiny—and the longer she scrutinizes the more complicated they seem. Back in 2017, for instance, a female Tonkean macaque known as Evalyne gave birth to her first baby, which died five days later. The morning of its death, Evalyne refused to eat, instead staying in her enclosure and screaming; after that, she carried the infant’s body everywhere, grooming it, licking it, and at one point putting her fingers in its mouth as if to stimulate the suckling reflex. For seventeen days, she never even set it down.
Evalyne’s behavior is not altogether uncommon in the animal kingdom. Many primates, including male ones, have been observed carrying dead babies, albeit typically for only a few hours or days. So have several cetaceans—most famously, an orca known as Tahlequah, who, without the primate’s advantage of hands, carried her deceased infant on her back continuously for weeks, across more than a thousand miles of the Salish Sea. Occasionally, such behavior is spotted in other species as well; in 2008, in Queensland, Australia, a dingo was observed carrying her deceased pup from place to place for four days while tending to its surviving littermates.
It is almost impossible to read such accounts and not feel that these animals understand what happened to their babies and are profoundly bereft. But Monsó counsels caution. When primates carry around their dead babies, she tells us, they often do so not tenderly but carelessly, in their mouths or dangling from one hand, letting the body bang into rocks and trees while they engage in all their ordinary activities, including mating. As for Evalyne, nineteen days after her baby died, she began to eat it. When the corpse started to fall apart, she would gnaw on one scrap of it for a while before discarding it in favor of another.
This is not the only story in Monsó’s book which takes place at the intersection of love, death, and dinner. We also read about a dog that, following the suicide of its owner, proceeded to eat the dead man’s face, even though the man was found less than an hour after death and the dog had plenty of food left in its bowl. This probably strikes you as an appalling violation of a relationship we typically imagine to be based on love and trust, but it is not exceptional. Good data are hard to come by, but estimates suggest that almost a quarter of pet owners who die alone will be partly consumed by their erstwhile animal companions.
Taken together, such anecdotes illuminate the limits of what you might call our intuitive thanatology. On hearing that a fellow-primate won’t let go of her dead baby, we ascribe to it maternal tenderness and piercing grief; on hearing that a dog ate its late owner, we ascribe to it blind appetite and brute indifference. But neither inference is necessarily correct. The primate’s behavior could instead suggest a failure to grasp the fact that the baby has died; far from being inconsolable, maybe the animal in question is just oblivious. More persuasively, maybe it is optimistic, since baby-carrying seems to occur only in so-called K-strategists—creatures, including primates and cetaceans, that invest enormous amounts of time and resources into a small number of offspring. For such creatures, it might make sense, no matter how lifeless a baby appears, to hold out for the possibility that it will somehow revive.
As for the dog: before you give yours away, consider this. Wild dogs that encounter a carcass generally begin consuming it at the nutrient-rich abdomen, then move on to the limbs; ninety per cent of the time, according to Monsó, they never even bite the face. By contrast, pet dogs go for the face almost three-quarters of the time, only rarely biting the abdomen. Monsó concludes from this that they don’t set out to eat their deceased owners but, rather, to get them to react, and that they focus on the face because they have always done so previously, studying it to ascertain their owners’ meaning and mood.
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