In the summer of 2018, an orca named Tahlequah gave birth off the coast of British Columbia. When the calf died just 30 minutes later, Tahlequah refused to let go. For more than two weeks, she carried the calf’s body around, often swimming while balancing it on her nose.
The story went viral, but it didn’t surprise Susana Monso, a philosopher of the animal mind at Madrid’s National University of Correspondence Education. There seems to be a huge gap between humans and killer whales, but this mother killer whale was behaving in a way that was very empathetic.
“This idea of a mother clinging to the body of her baby for 17 days seems understandable and relatable to those of us who have experienced loss,” Dr. Monceau said.
Of course, projecting our own human experiences onto other species can be a difficult task, and scientists often warn us about the mistakes we can make when engaging in this kind of anthropomorphism. I am. But we can also be misled by our tendency to assume that many cognitive and emotional traits are unique to humans, Dr. Monso said. And in her new book, Playing Possum, she argues that various animal species have at least a rudimentary concept of death.
Dr. Monceau spoke to The New York Times about her research. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How did you become interested in this aspect of the animal mind?
I have always been interested in capacities that are understood to be uniquely human, such as morality and rationality. Death was a natural theme. There were increasing reports of animals exhibiting various reactions to carcasses. This appeared to be the birth of a new discipline called comparative thanatology, which studied the relationship between animals and death.
You realize that animals don’t need to have a “concept” of death in order to react to it. Can you give me an example?
Carcasses can be very important objects because they represent an opportunity for scavengers or a threat for animals that can become infected with the pathogens they carry. Therefore, some animals have adaptations that allow them to detect carcasses.
Ants perform actions such as carrying dead ants away from the colony to the garbage heap. This behavior appears to rely on the detection of specific chemical cues, such as oleic acid, resulting from the decomposition process.
When we ingest oleic acid and apply it to live ants, the other ants treat it like a dead ant and take it to the garbage heap. So they don’t really understand death. All they are doing is responding more or less automatically to certain stimuli.
But you claim that many animals understand death.
The concept of death has often been understood in highly cognitively demanding ways. That is, it has been understood as requiring some form of understanding of infinity or absence. I’m thinking about what I call the “minimal concept of death.” The idea is that dead humans don’t do things that living things normally do, and that this is a permanent and irreversible condition.
One of the most interesting cases was when a chimpanzee was born with albinism. This is a very rare symptom in this species, and other members of the group reacted in a way that suggested they found the baby very scary. They started sounding the alarm and made these calls to signal predators. Their fur stood on end. Then, after a moment of panic, the alpha male grabbed the baby and killed it.
When the baby died, the chimpanzee’s attitude changed radically. They suddenly became very curious about this corpse. They were smelling it, touching it, pulling its hair. They showed no signs of fear. They understood that the baby could no longer harm them and that the baby’s dysfunction was irreversible.
Is it an exaggeration to say that animals are sad?
Carrying dead infants, as was seen in the case of Tahlequah, is very common among mammalian mothers who have lost their babies. I don’t think it’s at all far-fetched to think that this is an example of sadness. Grief is the emotional process of coming to terms with the death of another person. And this seems to be what mothers are doing.
What can we learn by considering how animals respond to death?
Thinking about the death of animals, how they deal with it and how they live this reality helps us understand that death is not an unfair thing that happens to us. It’s a trade that every living animal must participate in. We are bodies that function up to a certain point, but eventually break down irreparably. This is the same thing that happens to other animals around the world.
