For 17 days in the summer of 2018, the orca swam with her offspring balanced on her snout, covering more than a thousand miles and stirring sympathy across the globe.
But mother, it seemed, was not ready to let baby go.
To many people, including some scientists, Tahlequah’s journey looked a lot like parental grief.
But there were dissenting voices — scientists who warned against anthropomorphizing Tahlequah; who wondered if she’d carried her offspring because she thought the calf was still alive; who cautioned that we can’t really know if she experienced anything like what we describe as “grief.”
This is the stuff of a relatively new discipline known as comparative thanatology, which examines how animals respond to death.
And it is at the heart of a lively new book by Susana Monsó, a philosopher at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, called “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.”
She ponders Tahlequah’s tale, the case of the ant that attended her own funeral, and the story of a dog who gnawed at his dead owner. What emerges is a sometimes moving, occasionally funny, and always considered treatise on whether animals understand death — and what that even means.
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Susana Monsó, a philosopher at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, Spain, studies animal minds and animal ethics. Tanya Lacey
Along the way, she cautions against both anthropomorphization — attributing too many human characteristics to animals — and anthropectomy, the equally problematic tendency to deny human-typical characteristics in animals.
Animals may not conceive of death the way we do, she concludes, but our understanding is not the only valid kind.
I recently spoke via Zoom with Monsó from her home in Madrid. The interview has been condensed and edited.
We focus a lot, in the scientific literature and in the popular press, on whether animals grieve. Is that a mistake?
I think that animal grief is a super important topic. It is a dimension of the harm that animals can suffer that isn’t sufficiently reflected upon. For instance, if we’re talking about the morality of hunting animals, we’re usually just thinking about the animal we’re hunting and not the family members or the friends of this animal who are left behind and who are going to grieve this loss.
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But my book is concerned specifically with the question of whether animals can understand death. And if we want to address that question specifically, then focusing solely on grief is going to deliver a distorted portrayal of how animals relate to this phenomenon of death. Grief is just one possible emotional response to someone’s demise.
We experience this all the time. You know, we hear about famous people dying, and we process what that means. But we don’t grieve these losses, generally, because we’re not bonded to these individuals. We might be sad they died. We might be happy they died — even though it’s very politically incorrect to say that.
So I think that if scientists only focus on looking for grief, then they’re potentially missing out on a lot of other ways in which animals might relate to death.
You write, at some length, about animals that cannibalize their dead infants — and you suggest it may actually be a sign of motherly love.
We have this phenomenon that has generated a lot of attention — deceased infant carrying. The mothers of a lot of mammalian species hold onto their dead infants for prolonged periods of time.
One of the most supported hypotheses for this behavior is the mother-infant bond. But a lot of people have pointed out that, you know, there’s cannibalism in some of these cases — the mother carries the corpse but also alternates with feeding on the baby. This has been brought forward as a reason why maybe it’s not maternal care that’s driving this behavior. Maybe the mother has re-signified this thing that she’s carrying and just sees it as food. But that’s kind of incoherent with other aspects of this behavior, like the care that they tend to show toward these corpses. Even if they might nibble on them a little bit, they also carry them and protect them, and keep others in the group from accessing them or keep them from being submerged in the water.
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I’m not saying that that this cannibalism is necessarily a manifestation of maternal care. But I’m saying that this is not something that we should necessarily discard from the start. It could be that that’s just how that bond expresses itself.
We have this other case that I mentioned in the book — this very common phenomenon of dogs who feed on their dead owners. We have a lot of scientific evidence that dogs love us. So we have to reconcile these two facts.
Dogs tend to calm themselves with their mouths by eating things, by nibbling, by licking. And the same could be true of these mothers, where it is sort of driven by care. They have this anguish, and it sort of calms them down to nibble a little bit on this thing that they’re carrying.
We know we’re going to die. But as you write, we really don’t know if animals have a concept of their own mortality. Doesn’t that make it hard to argue they have a concept of death?
Even though we humans know we’re going to die, I don’t think that we can use that to assert a massive abyss between us and animals, because we tend to ignore that fact and bracket it and go through life as though it’s not going to happen to us.
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And there are some animals who might experience the reality of death in a much more salient way, like animals who live in herds and are under the constant threat of being eaten. Even if they don’t see it as something inevitable, it might be much more present.
What I’ve tried to argue is that the concept of death is a spectrum — that understanding it is not an all or nothing ability.
