Animals’ Understanding of Death Can Teach Us About Our Own

In 2018, field researchers in Uganda came across an unusual sight: a female chimpanzee carried an infant that she had recently given birth to, and which was affected by albinism, an extremely uncommon condition in this species that gives their fur a striking white color. Chimpanzee mothers often remove themselves from the group to give birth, which protects their babies from the infanticides that are sadly frequent in this species. The researchers seemed to have caught this mother on her return to the group. Sure enough, they were soon able to document the reactions of her mates when they first encountered the infant and his distinctive look.

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The behaviors they saw were far removed from the curiosity and care that newborns tend to elicit: instead, the chimpanzees reacted with what looked like extreme fear, with their fur on end and emitting the kinds of calls that signal potentially dangerous animals, such as snakes or unknown humans. Shortly after, violence ensued, and the alpha male together with a few of his allies killed and dismembered the little one. Upon his death, the behavior of the chimpanzees radically changed, and the apes, overtaken by curiosity, began to investigate the corpse: sniffing it, poking it, tugging at its fur and comparing it to their own, entranced by this being who smelled like a chimp but looked so different.

This tragic story is one of the best pieces of evidence we have that chimpanzees can understand death. The key here lies in their shift in attitude upon the baby’s demise. What at first was perceived as a threat suddenly transformed into a fascinating object worthy of the most thorough investigation, so harmless as to allow for tactile and olfactory inspection. It was as though the chimps had processed that that unusual animal could no longer hurt them.

But this is precisely what understanding death essentially means: grasping that a dead individual can no longer do what they could when they were alive.

Some scientists who study animals’ relation to death might disagree with this conclusion. Understanding death, they might argue, implies comprehending the absolute finality of it, its inevitability, its unpredictability, and the fact that it will affect everyone, including oneself. These scientists would be in the grip of what I have termed intellectual anthropocentrism: the assumption that the only way of understanding death is the human way, that animals either have a concept of death equivalent to the average adult human’s—or none at all.

Read More: What If Animals Have Nightmares Too?

But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Intellectual anthropocentrism is a bias that affects comparative thanatology, the study of how animals deal with and understand death. The way to extirpate this bias is by realizing that the concept of death is not an all-or-nothing matter, but rather a spectrum—something that comes in degrees. So when we study whether animals can understand death, we should not start from the hypercomplex human concept, but rather from what I call the minimal concept of death. Understanding death in minimal terms means grasping that dead individuals don’t do the sorts of things that living beings of their kind typically do, and that this is an irreversible state. And this is precisely what the chimpanzees’ behavior suggests that they had understood.

There is another bias that also affects comparative thanatology: what I have termed emotional anthropocentrism. This is the idea that animals’ reactions to death are only worthy of our attention when they appear human-like. Afflicted by this bias, comparative thanatologists have been looking for manifestations of grief in animals, exemplified by the story of Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead baby for 17 days and over 1000 miles, or Segasira, the gorilla who attempted to suckle from his dead mother’s breast despite already having been weaned. Don’t get me wrong: animal grief is a real and an important phenomenon that we should absolutely be paying attention to. However, if we’re only looking for mourning behavior in animals, we may be missing most of the picture.

Think back to the chimps. They clearly weren’t mourning the albino baby’s death. Instead, their behavior seemed dominated by an attitude of curiosity. But this did not detract from their understanding of what had happened. Grief does not signal a special or deep understanding of death. What it signals instead is the existence of a strong social bond between the mourner and the deceased.

But there are many ways of emotionally reacting to the realization that someone died that don’t involve grieving. You might react with joy, if, for instance, it means you’re inheriting a large sum of money. You might instead react with anger, if the deceased owed you money that you’re now never going to get back. You might react with excitement or hunger, if, say, your flight crashed in the Andes and there was no more food around. Or you might be totally indifferent, if you didn’t know the person or they meant nothing to you. Of course, all of these reactions are taboo in our societies, and we wouldn’t publicly admit to having them. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not possible. And crucially: they wouldn’t mean that you haven’t properly understood what happened. The polar bear who finally manages to catch a seal might understand death just as well as the heartbroken monkey mother who hangs on to her baby’s corpse, even though the former thinks of it as a gain rather than a loss.

The biases of emotional anthropocentrism and intellectual anthropocentrism have prevented us from seeing that there are many more ways of reacting to death than what is considered politically correct in our societies. In fact, the concept of death, instead of being a complex intellectual achievement within the sole reach of the most cognitively sophisticated species, is actually quite easy to acquire and linked to abilities that are crucial for survival. If we manage to extirpate these two biases, we will see that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human trait, is widespread in the animal kingdom and more diverse than we will ever know.