It was a story that pulled at the heartstrings. In 2018, an orca called Tahlequah was seen dragging the corpse of her newborn baby calf for 17 days, over 1,000 miles along the coast of North America. Eventually, Talequah let the baby go (happily, she’s had another baby since), but her behaviour left behind lots of questions among scientists about grief in animals.
Other animal behaviour suggests a complex relationship with death. A mother chimpanzee was observed cleaning the teeth of her dead son. And some elephant calves have also been found buried in ways that suggest grief and mourning.
In this week’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Susana Monsó, a philosopher who researches animal ethics and animal minds, about the different ways animals understand death.
Since starting her research on animals and death, one of Monsó’s favourite animals has been the opposum. These cute, furry marsupials play dead when they feel threatened, as she explains.
“She adopts the bodily and facial expression of a corpse. Her bodily functions are reduced. Her breathing and heart rate drop. Her body temperature drops. She opens her mouth and her tongue hangs out and adopts this bluish hue and she expels this putrid smell and liquid from her anal glands, and she stops responding to the world.”
Monsó, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, Spain, found the opposum’s behaviour so fascinating that the animal became the protagonist of her new book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.
Johnruble/Wikimedia Commons
She says that an opposum’s death display, which is aimed at convincing a predator that it’s dead to give it a chance to escape, must have had an evolutionary advantage. But, for playing dead to work, Monsó says, the predator really needs to believe it.
“The opossum shows us how her predators think of death, what they think a corpse looks like and smells like and feels. That’s why she succeeds in deceiving them, and this makes it more likely for her to pass on her genes.”
But some animals seem to react to death in ways that appear to be counterproductive. Monsó gives the example of a chimpanzee in a zoo in Valencia that was seen holding onto her baby’s corpse for seven months, and to the orca Tahlequah.
“It seems like very maladaptive in a lot of respects … why are these mothers spending so much energy on these babies who are dead, they’re not contributing to passing on their genes.”
While there may be a number of factors involved, Monsó says one of the biggest is maternal grief and the bond between mother and baby.
“These are animals that have extended periods of maternal care and a high level of dependency on the part of the baby. And so evolution needs to have provided the mothers with very strong motivations to take care of the babies because otherwise the babies are not going to make it to maturity.”
Monsó points to what she calls the minimal concept of death: one animal understanding that a dead animal is both no longer functioning as it would when it was alive, and that this is an irreversible situation. She says that some animals may also understand that death can happen to individuals who are now alive, but that this will depend on an animal’s experience and its intelligence.
Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear Monsó talk more about her research, and the debates about anthropomorphism that emerge relating to research into animals and death.
Newsclips in this episode from CBS News and The Star.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.
Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.
