Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. My name is Hoorge Jam and to me. On the program, we are answering the question do animals, like your pet or animals in the wild understand death. We're gonna be talking to a psychologist who's been studying chimpanzees for over forty years, and we're gonna hear from a philosopher of animal minds got obsessed with this topic as a way to deal with their own mortality. So do dogs dwell on their own demise or do possums ponder their pastor?
Let's find out as we answer the question do animals understand death?
Hey?
Everyone, I thought I'd start the episode with one of the most fascinating interviews I've done for this show. It's with a psychologist named James Anderson. Doctor Anderson is now a professor emeritus at Kyoto University, and he has spent the last forty years studying chimpanzees and monkeys and their behavior they eat, sleep, and work together. But then in
two thousand and eight, something incredible happened. His team of researchers recorded, for the first time ever on video, the passing away of an adult chimpanzee surrounded by her close group. One of his students, Louise Locke, was studying a group of chimpanzees at the Blair Drummon Safari Park in the middle of Scotland, and she was just there to study their sleep patterns, but almost by accident, they happened to record the moment of death of a chimpanzee named Pansy.
Here's how doctor Anderson describes it.
One member of the chimpanzee group was at the time the oldest chimpanzee in the UK. She was around sixty years of age. She had been a circus chimpanzee in her early life, but she was now suffering from age relate to diseases. And then one day the keeper of the chimpanzees noticed that she was breathing very heavily and she thought she's not going to last very long.
So the oldest chimpanzee in the UK, Pansy looked like she was about to pass away. At this point, this very part caretaker had to make a choice about what to do, and he decided to let nature take its course and let her pass away. Surrounded by her closed group. He let her be, but he left the video camera running all night. When the researchers reviewed the video the next day, they were shocked. Can you describe what you saw in that video?
Yes? Well, what was clear is that by the time the video started, the old female chimpanzee, she was lying up on a platform. Occasionally the chimpanzees would come over
and groom the old female. But then three of the chimpanzees and the group came over and gathered around her at once, and this was the first time this was happening, and two of them were grooming her, her daughter and her long term friend, another adult female, and then the adult male in the group came over and he bent down and looked closely into her face, and then he took her by the shoulder and gradually shoot her shoulder
while staring at close range into her face. And then he laid her shoulder back down on the ground, looked at her, and then moved away.
As Pansy laid there dying, her daughter and her best friend gathered around her and seemed to be comforting her, holding her hand and grooming her. The adult male of the group came and shook her as if he was trying to shake her back to life.
A few moments later, Rosie, her daughter, and then her lifelong friend remained holding her hand, and that was most of the contacts over the next several hours. Not long after that period, the female was dead by then, and what we had witnessed was the precise moment where the adult male seemed to be checking for any signs of life and perhaps realizing that she had gone, when the other two members of the group were giving the final
moments of comfort to the adult female. Her daughter slept beside her all night long, and then the following morning her long term friend came over and sat by her, and because of that responses by the male, he had left some straw on her, so she gently cleaned the straw of her body and her face and just sat by her for a while.
Wow. Now what amazed doctor Anderson was how close this behavior was what you might observe in humans. Pessy's family seemed to have gathered to accompany her and to be close to her in her final moments. When doctor Anderson and his team wrote a paper describing this video, they wrote about how this seemed very similar to what humans would do. Here was his reaction.
That's what I described in the paper some of the responses that have been described in human societies when they're dealing with the final moments of our whose relative we see time and time again. This gentle contacts quietness, caressing the corpse sometimes in some individuals, and outburst of anger directed towards the crops, especially by close relatives who really feel anger at being left. Attempts to check for signs of life. You know, now we humans, we've got more
medical ways of doing it, checking for pulse. But you know, the chimpanzee was doing what he knows. We concluded by saying, well, at least some aspects of the response to the peaceful death within our group may have parallels between chimpanzees and our own species. And I've got some interesting reactions.
When doctor Anderson published the paper describing this video, along with his PhD student and the Safari Parks caretaker, caused a media frenzy is university. At the time, the University of Stirling was inundated with phone calls and emails. They were invited to be on TV, radio magazines in the UK and across the world, and it helped give a spark to the general conversation about whether animals understand death now. Part of the excitement here is that these observations of
animals at moments of death are rare. One of the closest examples on record that doctor Anderson could find had happened thirty years before in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
An accidental death reported in wild chimpanzees when an adult male fell out of a tree and died instantly on hitting the ground. And then the response of the other chimpanzees couldn't have been more different. The group members erupted into a frenzy of excitement and alarm, embracing each other, screaming, running towards the body, staring at it but never coming into contact with a disbelief at first, are running around
in almost panic. There was also lots of mutual embracing, as if trying to reassure other individuals.
You know, my reaction when you just told that story was that that also seems very human in how we would react if we suddenly saw traumatic death.
Yes. Almost.
This paper also helped push forward a new field of science called comparative thanatology. The word panatology means the study of dying and it comes from Thanatos, the Greek god of death, and yes, it's also what inspired the name
of the supervillain Thanus in the Marvel movies. Now, the word comparative in comparative panatology means you're studying dying in different species of animals, not just humans and apes, to find out what they have in common and what that tells us about evolution and whether humans are unique or not in how we relate to our own mortality. Next, we're going to talk to someone who's written a book
about comparative panatology and how animals understand death. And she's looked at species ranging from ants to possums, to elephants to wales, and when we come back, she can tell us how all of these animals experience their own expiration. Stay with us, you're listening to science stuff. Hey, welcome back. We just talked about how chimpanzees are closest relatives react to one of their own passing away. The question now is how do other animals react to death? Are their
signs that they understand what it is. To answer this question, I talk to someone who is a philosopher of animal minds. Doctor Susanamonceau is a professor at the National University of Distance Education in Spain, and she's written a book called Playing Possum, How Animals Understand Death. I asked doctor Monse what got her interested in this question.
I had done my PhD. Whether animals could behave morally, whether they have emotions like empathy, and so I've always been interested in questions that have to do with those capacities that we tend to think of as uniquely human. There was an emergence of field biologists documenting animals reacting in interesting ways to dead individuals. At the same time, there's also kind of a personal sight to the story. I was about to turn thirty, and I think I
became obsessed with death. A lot of people have this period of existential angst. My grandmother had just died, and I think turning thirty also was symbolic in that really a moment where you're definitely an adult. You can no longer pretend like you're just a youngster. Yeah, I was really afraid of it.
I asked doctor Mansa to tell us of different examples from her book of animals reacting to another animal passing away, starting with elephants.
So elephants is a typical animal that everyone thinks of. Because elephants are like the animal that has some special relationship with death, people think of elephant graveyards, which apparently are a myth. They don't really seem to go any specific place to die.
That's right. Elephant graveyards, meaning a special place where elephants go when they're ready to die, are not really supported by scientific evidence. It's probably more of a myth. However, elephants do seem to act in a special way when other elephants pass away, but.
They do seem to be very interested in death, and specifically in the deaths of fellow elephants, and they will visit the corpses of elephants that have died, even if they're not related. They visit these corpses and they touch them, they sniff them, they are very interested in them, which
doesn't happen with corpses of other animals. There's like a parade of different elephant families that come to it and interact with the corpse in some way, and some of the interactions are tactile or factory, or sometimes they do other interesting things like trying to put food in the mouth of the elephant, trying to help it stand up.
So when an elephant has passed away, scientists have recorded that other elephants will line up and one by one smell and touch the dead elephant. In one famous experiment, scientists place the skulls of different animals in front of elephants to see which ones they would interact with. Some of the skulls were of rhinoceross, some were of buffalo,
and some were of elephants. Scientists found that the elephants would pick up and examine the skulls of elephants more than they did the others, which meant that elephants have a unique curiosity about dead members of their own species. Next, doctor Monceaut talked about an orca named Tealiqua.
So perhaps one of the behaviors that has received the most attention is that of deceased infant carrying. For instance, there was a very famous case, the case of the orca Teliqua, who made the news in the summer of twenty eighteen when she was seen carrying her baby scorpse for seventeen days and over one thousand miles, which is insane, and she was recently in the news again because she was doing it for a second time with another of her calves who had also died. So it's very very tragic.
So this orca whale telikua would hold on to her dead baby and continue to push her and keep her from sinking for weeks. And this behavior of holding on to their dead young happens in other species of animals.
It's a behavior that we see in a lot of mammalian mothers, so mammal species in which there is a prolonged period of maternal care. And what we see here is that very often when the baby dies, the mother seems to have a hard time accepting this reality and holds onto the corpse for a prolonged period of time.
But wouldn't that tell you that maybe the animal doesn't understand death or has the wrong understanding of what has happened to their baby.
So some people have put forward this hypothesis. The most important takeaway from this behavior is probably not so much that they're understanding death, but the fact that they're really
grieving their baby's death. And this may be accompanied by a concept of death, but it may also be part of the process through which the animal learns about death through holding onto this baby, maybe hoping that it will revive and ultimately seeing that it doesn't and deciding to let it go, which they eventually do.
Wow, that's fascinating. This behavior of mothers continuing to carry their babies that have passed the way has been seen in Wales, chimpanzees, dolphins, and even giraffes. And this is where we touch on the concept of grief. According to doctor Muntzel, grief is not the same thing as an understanding of death, and in fact they're independent. You can
have grief without understanding death. For example, you can grieve the loss of something that wasn't alive, like your house, or you can grieve a breakup with someone you loved. And you can understand death without grieving. For example, you might be glad that someone you didn't like died. Okay, the last example doctor Munsoll brought up involves not just understanding death but faking it.
So one of my favorite examples here is the apossum, which is in the title of my book and in the cover as well. And the apossum is very interesting because the apossum famously plays possum right. The apossum plays dead when she feels threatened, and she does this in a bare, very spectacular way. It's a very very complex defense mechanism. The apossum will adopt the bodily and facial expression of a corpse. Her body temperature is reduced, her
breathing and heart rate are reduced. She expels this putrid smelling liquid from her glance. She stops responding to the world very radically, so you can pick her up and she just doesn't respond.
She plays dead. Basically, she pretends to be dead.
It's like putting on a corpse disguise. Even her tongue turns blue. So it's very impressive, very very elaborate.
But does that mean that it understands death.
For the apossum? This is probably an automatic behavior. I don't think the apossum understands that she's playing dead. It doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the opossum's mind. But if this behavior has evolved, there needs to have been the predator's concept of death. This is only going to work if it's actual convincing the predator, right, So this behavior is showing us the predators understand death what they take to be a convincing display of death.
Okay, this is pretty cool. What doctor Monceux is saying, is that an opossum plane dead. Doesn't tell us anything about whether the opossum understands death. It might just be a reflex or an instinct for them. But it does tell you that the predator understands death, or at least that it reacts to the signs of something appearing to be dead. The question is not how do you pretend to be dead? The question is how do you convince another animal that you are dead?
Exactly. It's like stick insects. They don't need to understand that they look like sticks in order for their appearance to be advantageous, but we know that their predators mistake them for sticks and don't want to eat sticks. It's telling us something about their predators' minds. Right.
So then in this case, it's example tells us that there is some understanding of the state of being alive and death.
That's right, and that they understand dead individuals to look a certain way, feel a certain way, that they expect different behaviors from dead individuals. It's very interesting. It really gives us a window into the minds of these animals.
Okay, so lots of different animals from chimpanzees to whales, to predators like wolves, and by extension, dogs and cats seem to react to dead animals and they act different because of it. But does that mean that they understand death? Maybe in the same way that you or I understand what it means to die. Now, the big danger here is to see an animal doing something and then assume that it has human emotions or intentions. This is called anthropomorphizing. Here's how doctor Monceaux explains it.
Anthropomorphism is something that anyone who studies animals is really afraid of, because humans have this tendency to anthropomorphize everything. You know, even like our computer stops working and we're like, oh, it doesn't want to work, or you know, we get angry at our car if it breaks down. We attribute intentions to inanimate objects all the time, and certainly we do this all the time with our pets. We're constantly
interpreting their behavior in human ways. We send each other videos of animals doing something and some funny music that makes it look like they're dancing or whatever. So it's understood that when you entropomorphize an animal, you are mistakingly describing their behavior in human terms. So you're attributing to them a human quality that they don't actually have.
So it'd be a mistake to see, for example, a whale carrying their calf that's passed away. I think that they're grieving just like a human mother would. Or to see a chimpanzee carrest her friend who's about to pass away, and think that they are being tender and caring, like how we would treat someone close to us under deathbed. At the same time, doctor Monteux says it could also be a mistake to do the opposite.
I think that there's also the complimentary worry, which has to do with the other side of the coin, what Kristin Andrews and Brian Husk called anthropectomy, which consists of mistakenly denying a human typical characteristic to an animal. So if we say that an animal is grieving when she's not, we would be anthropomorphizing the animal. But if we say no, she can't be grieving because that's human exclusive when she
actually is grieving. These are both false descriptions of reality, and there's no reason to fear one over the other. So we have to be careful not to over attribute, but also not to under attribute. We have to really try to find the description that is true that actually captures what the animal is like.
So how do we make sense of what we see in the animal kingdom? How do we understand how animals understand death? To answer this, we need to dig into what it means to understand death. When we come back, I'm going to ask our two experts this question, and hopefully we'll put the whole mystery of whether animals understand death to rest. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back with more science stuff and we're back.
Okay.
So, animals ranging from chimpanzees to elephants to whales seem to react to animals dying in ways that seem almost human. And we know that predators, which include cats and dogs, seem to instinctively know the difference between something alive and dead. But does that mean they understand death. To answer this question, we need to define what it means to understand death. None of us are born with an understanding of it. It's something we gain as we grow up, and it
typically comes in stages. Here's that doctor Anderson describes it.
I think most thanatologists, those people who study death and buying, particularly in humans, would I agree that we humans share four basic aspects or components of our concept of death. One is that its death is irreversible. Once something or someone is dead, that's the aint coming back. The second one is probably the notion that a dead individual is completely non functional. They can't perceive anything, there's no mental activity,
there's no emotions, there's no or agency. They're completely in theer lumps of meat, if you like.
So an understanding of death, most scientists agree, is like a table that stands on four legs. The first leg is non functionality, basically that a body can't move or do anything once it's passed away. The second leg is irreversibility, the idea that once it happens, there's no going back. The third and fourth legs are a little more subtle.
The third one is this notion of what many people refer to as universality, and related to that, some people refer to it as inevitability, the idea that everyone, every living thing will eventually meet its demise and cease to exist. And the final one is causality, that we know basically what causes death.
So those are the four legs of a four understanding of death. The third leg is universality, the idea that all living things will inevitably die, and the fourth leg is causality, meaning having an understanding of what causes an individual to die. Now, most mature humans have a grasp of all four ideas, and so we can say that we have a full understanding of the concept of death. But if you think back to when you were a kid, you might remember that you didn't know all of these
things all at once. You might have learned these in a sequence, or maybe you partially learned them at different times, depending on your life experience or who you talk to. Okay, now that we've said what it means to understand death, let's see what our experts say about whether animals can have this understanding.
Okay, if we go back to those four components, irreversibility, non functionality, the universality of death, and the causality what causes death. I think what we know about how chimpanzees respond to dead individuals. For me, it takes the box for understanding the irreversibility of death. A dead individual is not going to come back to life. When you see a group of chimpanzees reactions to a dead juvenile, or
a dead adult. Then you'll see that they really behave towards the corpse in which that they would never do to that individual when it was alive. And I think they're learning that we can do anything with this chimpanzee. This chimpanzee is not going to react. It doesn't feel anything. We can pound on its dest we can jump up and down on it. It's never going to move. So that takes also the non functionality component. So we've got
the understand the reversibility. They understand nonfunctionality. I think about causality. I think chimpanzees have some understanding about what causes death. If they see a chimpanzee falling from a great height and it's no longer moving, if you see a chimpanzee that's just being attacked by a leopard, then I think we understand that is the cause of death, that these
ruins are fatal. So I think they've got some understanding of causality, not to the extent that we understand the biological causes of lack of oxygen or loss of blood, but nonetheless they have some understanding of external causes. But it takes me to the fourth component universality. For me, universality means that you realize that everyone is going to die. That means other individuals or that they're capable of dying. I think chimpanzees have that ability.
So doctor Anderson thinks chimpanzees are capable of grasping most of the components of an understanding of death. They can understand nonfunctionality, irreversibility, some sense of causality, and most of the idea of universality. We'll come back to that in a minute. Then I asked doctor Monceiua this question about other animals like elephants, whales, cats, and dogs, and this is what she said, Well, what do all of those
examples you've talked about in the animal kingdom? What do they tell us about whether animals understand death.
Of course, it's still very early and we're still only starting to think about these questions. But I think that the concept of death it really boils down to the idea of understanding that individuals don't do the things that living individuals of their kind do, and that this is an irreversible state. I think that's what understanding death at its core is, and that's actually quite easy to reach
because it's just not very complicated to understand. It's about having certain expectations about how living beings around you behave learning due to your past experiences that once death has happened, you can no longer expect these behaviors from the animal. And I think also that there are many different contexts where animals are going to be able to acquire the necessary experiences to learn about this.
In other words, doctor Monceaux thinks that if you define an understanding of death as only needing two of the legs we talked about before, non functionality and irreversibility, then we can say that lots of animals understand death because those two ideas are not that complicated or hard to learn and understand. Meaning even your dog can figure out that a dead and smelly red is not moving and
that it's not going to move again. Of course, you might think, well, the dog doesn't understand the other two ideas or legs, universality and causality. Doesn't that mean it doesn't really understand death. Well, that's only if you think that the human way of understanding death is the only way to understand death.
We can find this idea in many texts in comparative penatology, where researchers are saying, you know, animals cannot understand infinity, or they don't have a concept of time, or they don't have a concept of absence, and therefore they can't understand death. So in a way, they're all over intellectualizing the concept of death. And what I do in my book is I turned that question into the question of do they have anything that counts as a concept of death, even if it's different from our own.
Do animals understand death? The answer is yes, depending on what you mean by understanding death. If it means understanding it at a basic level, that it means you can't move once you're dead, and that it's irreversible, then lots of animals seem to understand death. But if you mean understanding more complex concepts like the medical causes of death or the idea that all creatures will eventually die, then it's probably not possible for most animals to understand death
at the same level as humans. Now, as a last question, I asked our experts what all of this tells us about how humans are different from most animals, and they both agree there is one thing that seems unique to us, and that is an ability to understand the inevitability of our own mortality.
Where I think the line might be drawing. I'm not sure that chimpanzees are capable of understanding their own mortality. They don't fall into the kind of feeling of entrapment and despair that humans sometimes do.
You know, if an animal is don't about death, she has a very limited number of experiences, and she's not going to be able to reach on her own the understanding that everyone dies, whereas humans, you know, we understand that our death is inevitable because we've been told.
We have language for it, whereas an animal maybe doesn't have language for it. That's right, Doctor Anderson doesn't think chimpanzees have the forethought to really imagine a world in which they don't themselves exist, and doctor Mossela thinks you need language to really grasp the concept of inevitability, which means respecial because we're able to appreciate the fact that, at least temporarily we are not dead. Okay, I lied.
I did ask our experts one more question, and that is whether thinking about how animals deal with death had changed their own perspectives on the topic. Here's what they said, I'm not really sure that it has changed on view in general. I've had enough experience of death of people that I've known uncherished to accept that it's inevitable. I don't share it, and I hope that when it does come, I hopefully accept.
So I think that studying it in animals has been very illuminating and somehow comforting, because, strangely enough, when you read enough about death and other species, you come to realize that it's a reality you just cannot escape. It's a deal that every single living being steps into. There's no other choice. If you want to be alive, then you have to die.
In other words, it's understanding death that makes us appreciate life, and that seems to be lately human. Thanks for listening. See you next time you've been listening to science Stuff. The production of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Hey Cham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Pegram And you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD comics
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