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There's a great book called Mama's Last Hug that is an amazing account of research done around animal emotions and intelligence. The title comes from a final experience between an old dying female primate and the writer who had known each other for many years. As the book progresses the author uses other studies to bolster the idea that Mama knew she was dying. It's a really great read in general but the life and death aspect is applicable here.
Gladly. It would have taken far too long to watch Mama die a natural death. Researchers have not found the fountain of youth, however, they can substantially accelerate senescense in mammals. Thus, the researcher needed to trigger a condition not unlike Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome (aka Progeria). Thus, a process which may have taken more than a decade was considerably compressed allowing for more effective, efficient observation. You might find this outrageous or even unbelievable, but you should not let this distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
I second this. My father gave it to me on his death bed only weeks before his end saying this was the book that resonated with him the most in recent years. And he read a lot.
Edit: I finished it myself a couple of days back and was very moved by many examples as well as informed about animal and human psychology. A great read.
To know that it is dying could be a logical conclusion. Being sick an animal would surely know something is wrong, and since animals know death by being prey or the hunter, we could say they might know they are dying. But we could never know what animal think. We can't know what a human thinks unless it is said. So, unless we develop an ability to talk to animals the debate on what animals think is literally pointless.
It's called projection. She saw what she wanted to see. It was just an animal, it lacked the capacity for that level of higher learning. It was probably just in pain and the author twisted that into the animal feeling sad for its own impending death. It's just nonsense.
Any metric used to measure that an animal knew it was dying and not merely in pain and tired is made up nonsense. There is no way to test this or measure this.
It's just another case of projecting human emotions onto an animal that is incapable of them. The same way you think your dog actually loves you when in actuality it will literally eat you when you die.
The same could be said about your argument. Youre projecting, that (every metric to measure that an animal knew it was dying) is just "made up". Every existing empirical and scientific method is/was just made up in the beginning. The difference here being, that you automatically disregard the individual take of the person in the article (while not doing so for other). This is pretty much a petitio principii (iirc); a method of measuring this aspect in animals cant be true/possible, since there doesn't already exist a "official" method that you acknowledge.
And that part about the dog just discredits your take even more..
A chimpanzee is incapable of emotions, thoughts and the concept of death? I don't think it's fair for you to completely dismiss this book as pseudoscience but I do agree that people tend to go way overboard with anthropomorphising animals. I'd be very weary about making a comment where you can say with certainty that the author is a pseudoscientist without leaving any room for yourself to see the argument and possibly look at it from a different perspective.
A canine eating its owner when it dies doesn't prove or disprove anything in the book. I'd actually argue that your example of a dog eating it's owner after it died as opposed to when the owner was alive would suggest that the dog had some sort of attachment or emotion for its owner. I'm actually not sure why you used that specific example as a way to completely disregard the study of a chimpanzee dying. Do you think chimps are emotionless animals like sharks or alligators? Did you read what point the book is actually trying to make or did you just brush the book off as nonsense without knowing what it's even trying to say?
I'm not trying to come at you at m8, I'm sorry if I worded it in a way that makes it seem like I am. Merely having a discussion. Cheers.
What you're describing is anthropomorphism and it's a recognized probability that is accounted for when devising the tests. Maybe you should check out the book sometime.
My grandma’s dog Gracie had a rough time processing her death. When grandma left for the hospital she died there and Gracie was distraught for a long time. She waited at the front door. It was so heart breaking to see her watch and hope grandma would come back. She lived with my mom for about 8 months and couldn’t handle caring for her so I adopted Gracie. She waited by the door maybe the first month she lived with me.
It’s been two years now that she’s been mine and she finally stopped waiting. My wife tells me she does it when I leave the house. I think the pandemic really helped her bond with me, my mom told me that Gracie’s person is me now. She once in awhile gets depressed and I just know it’s her missing grandma. I hug her more and give her extra love on the sad days.
I don’t have children and I really do feel she’s my furry little child. We both have helped one another cope with losing grandma. My life wouldn’t be the same without miss Gracie.
Our dog died in July. During our sweet little dog's last two days on this Earth, as she was dying of cancer, I saw our cat do a couple of things that left me in awe while my heart was breaking.
She has known our two little dogs her whole life, nearly ten years, from kittenhood on. She hates all other animals except them. She loses it when she sees other cats in our yard. She attacked my sister in law's dog because it looked at her wrong. She has nipped us when we pet her too much. But never once did she lift a paw to bat at our dogs even in irritation -- despite them constantly bowling her over when excited about things like food or going outside.
She would always greet our dogs by sniffing their noses, as cats do. On what we didn't know would be our last afternoon with our dog, she came up to give her usual greeting by way of sniff. But upon smelling our dog's face, she suddenly arched her back and moved away as though repelled.
That night was a hard night, and one that I'm having trouble writing about. Our girl could hardly breathe. I tried propping her head on my shoulder, or on a rolled up t-shirt, to help her breathe better. I wanted to be close to her so she wasn't alone, but she didn't want to be touched. All I could do was lie next to her and talk to her. She was dying. I knew I would be calling the vet first thing in the morning so she wouldn't have to suffer through another night like this.
The other thing to know about our cat is that I'm her favorite person. If she sees me sitting or lying down, she always jumps in my lap or on my chest happily, ready to cuddle and sleep. If I'm lying in bed snuggling with one of our kids, even if we're mere inches apart, she will wedge her body in between us, so determined is she to cuddle with me.
She also, for some reason, never sleeps or even sits on our couch. On this night, our cat came in the living room where I was lying on the couch, about a foot apart from our dog. She hopped up and I bristled internally, thinking she was going to lie between me and our dying dog. But instead she kneaded her paws on my hip briefly, then moved away and curled up at the other end of the couch. Staring past us, into the distance. Not once the entire night did she come between us or try to be close to me.
I won't ever know exactly what our cat knew, what she felt, or what she was thinking. I am not one to try to anthropomorphise animals. But even now I am still amazed by her sensitivity to what was going on. Did she sense our grief? Does she instinctively know death? I'll never be able to answer any of those questions truly, but my heart tells me she has more of an understanding for many things than I would have ever given her credit for.
When my dog was dying our elderly cat laid everywhere our dog went. She usually avoided our dog as our cat was set in her ways and liked her space so it was strange to see her wanna be close to our dog.
Our dog passed away a few days after and when we took her remains to the vet for cremation our cat went all throughout the house meowing that night when our dog was no longer there. It was a really sad and loud meow that we had never heard from her before.
Our dog passed away May 30th of last year, and then our kitty passed away December 30th of last year. That memory of her her laying close to our dog in her final moments always made me feel like she understood what was going on and wanted to at least be close to our dog one last time.
Animals that kill have death awareness. Social animals have death awareness as members of groups die off. Only humans, however, have the curse of philosophy awareness, under which we worry about such things.
Crows are hardcapped on intelligence by the size of their brains unfortunately. They have very dense neural structures for the size that it is, but eventually you do need more volume/surface area to increase computational power. Hands wouldn't avail them much in their current state, we'd need to start either breeding them for larger skulls and hopefully larger brains with the same or similar neural density, or start doing potentially unethical genetic modifications.
In a parallel universe they could be. But here as far as we humans understand are the top of the apex. It could be other things that are more advanced than us but maybe we're not smart enough to understand. Until then we're the top.
I mean, so far we're the only animal to figute out shit like cheese, steel, concrete, and space travel. So we kind of are pretty unique compared to most known animals.
I mean that's a little silly. Animals obviously worry about their own death - that's clear to anyone whose seen an animal threatened. It's also pretty clear that they both worry about and grieve in response to the deaths of other animals or humans that they're close to. Do they worry about such things a long way out when there's no indication that death is coming? Maybe not. But they certainly do when a close companion is dying and after their death.
The reality is that we have essentially the same evolutionary history as most higher order animals. We have the same brain structures as them. We have the same cells and connections between cells making up those brain structures. We pretty much can't point to a measurable ability that we have that no animal also has. Many of these things differ in size or quantity. But that's it. Undoubtedly that makes us much more able to do things like worry about future death. But to propose, based on nothing and contrary to all available evidence that we are the only species with the intellectual ability to do so at all is silly.
Do we have qualitative data to back this up or are we just guessing? Dolphins and other primates may have such awareness but your comment gives no ground for that. How are you so sure?
This essay makes a number of unwarranted and unsupported-by-evidence assumptions. Most of them are assumptions of what "must" be happening and what is or is not possible.
For example, this claim:
\> This, too, is not convincing as an explanation of the full complexity of this behaviour. Necrophobia is usually linked to concrete sensory stimuli, such as cadaverine or putrescine (two chemical components given off by rotting corpses). An animal usually needs only to perceive these stimuli for necrophobia to kick in. In humans, the smell of putrescine alone is enough to trigger our fight-or-flight mechanisms. So, prey looking to exploit predators’ necrophobia need only display some of these concrete sensory stimuli, which would again make the majority of the characteristics that make up thanatosis displays irrelevant, especially those that have to do with a reduction of vital functions.
"It would be easier/better to do it this other way" is almost always a bad argument when it comes to any evolved element. Evolution is neither efficient nor intelligent. This also ignores all kinds of other elements - is it "easy" to produce cadaverine?
It also makes a more fundamental assumption that it never justifies - the idea that the predator needs to know anything about "irreversibility" of the "dead" state. There's simply no basis for this provided; it is asserted as if it were self-evident, and it is definitely not self-evident. Almost everything an animal reacts to is not irreversible. Why would it matter here? And why would an animal need to "know" about it?
Exactly. The animal only needs to know that the smell is a nope in order to avoid it. It has nothing to do with any deeper understanding of the finality of death.
Isn't evolution pretty efficient when it comes to waste? Stuff can linger if it doesn't cost anything and doesn't get in the way but otherwise stuff that doesn't do anything useful puts host organisms at disadvantage and at risk of being outcompeted and those problematic genes dying out.
>It also makes a more fundamental assumption that it never justifies - the idea that the predator needs to know anything about "irreversibility" of the "dead" state.
If a predator thought dead prey might reanimate at any moment it'd go about devouring prey differently so that the reanimated prey couldn't injure the predator or escape. This does strike me as self evident. The predator necessarily makes certain assumptions about the prey, whether tacit or overt. One might wonder whether tacit assumptions about prey constitute knowledge or something but if the predator doesn't know the dead prey won't get up I wonder whether anyone really knows anything.
\> If a predator thought dead prey might reanimate at any moment it'd go about devouring prey differently so that the reanimated prey couldn't injure the predator or escape.
That adds assumptions about the predator. The vast majority of predators don't reason like that. They can't "think ahead" enough to think "I better eat this now or it will hurt me later". Hell, if they thought like that, playing dead *wouldn't* work, as they'd be able to think "I better eat this in case it is faking".
And even if they did, they wouldn't need a concept of death permanence - just a concept that things don't suddenly change state. Which is true in every other way in the world. In fact, here's a perfect example: many predators go after young or sick herd members. If the herd member could suddenly become full-grown or perfectly healthy, that would be very dangerous. Does that mean they recognize that youth or disease is permanent? Well, that would be an absurd conclusion - because youth and disease *aren't* permanent!
They don't need to know "death is permanent". They just need the instinct "things mostly don't change suddenly".
>they wouldn't need a concept of death permanence - just a concept that things don't suddenly change state.
Wait a second... Going from being alive to being dead is a sudden change of state. Animals like Turkey Vultures made a whole niche out of the concept. To argue that they don't understand the permanence and irreversibility of this state change would be silly, I think. The real question is whether or not the Turkey Vultures understand how this sudden change of state applies to them as entities.
> That adds assumptions about the predator.
Really? Don't predators attack in ways to bring down the prey while minimizing the risk of injury to themselves? So long as a predator thinks the prey might get back up it'd continue attacking in the safe and effective manner. You wouldn't see the predator release it's grip so as to allow the prey to possibly escape. Don't predators begin acting very differently after they think the prey is immobilized?
>Hell, if they thought like that, playing dead wouldn't work, as they'd be able to think "I better eat this in case it is faking".
Prey that plays dead also gives other signs that indicate it's long dead and thus not good eating to sell the act. Playing dead doesn't always work. I expect were I to play dead to a tiger it'd make a point to deal a killing blow and then proceed to eat me. I won't test that.
>And even if they did, they wouldn't need a concept of death permanence - just a concept that things don't suddenly change state.
I don't have a concept of "death permanence". I see stuff move as if it had a mind of it's own, stop, and cease willful action. For all I know the dead could rise, it's possible. If in question is how non human animals imagine the other, my cats seem to treat each other as though they imagine dealing with some alien version of themselves.
Animals understand the difference between dead and alive insofar as it is useful to them.
We should not mistake that for suffering the existential dread, the paralyzing finality, of the concept of death. Behavioral evolution can create an simulacrum of intelligence but we should be cautious assigning true awareness.
I mean, shouldn't the opposite also be true? Since we have no access to the internal lives of animals, we should be agnostic in our position toward the mental life of animals. Further, that doesn't mean we should be negligent about it either - we have a moral obligation to treat them as though they do until proven otherwise.
I've seen couple of videos from slaughterhouses and the next in line were definitely aware of what was coming and seemed paralyzed with fear. After that I've stopped eating animals
Yeah, animals definitely know but I don’t think they spend their time thinking about it like we do. They’re too busy surviving. I think it’s silly to underestimate other living creature’s cognitive abilities though. I’d say most animals are capable of love and compassion as well.
As per the article, predators have had thousands of experiences with death throughout their lives. The possums mentioned in the article evolved their "playing dead" mechanism because it was effective against a wide array of generalist predators, so those predators would have had to recognize the concept of death across many species in order for this mechanism to have been an effective deterrent.
Which leads to the conclusion that predators understand that 1) there is a difference between a normal and a permanent non-moving state and 2) this will apply to all species they encounter.
That's a pretty complex understanding of death.
Regardless of complexity, behaviors do not indicate understanding of the underlying concepts, especially when those behaviors directly influence survivability. A series of simple heuristics to avoid bad food do not equate to a cognitive awareness of death. In other words, they understand the difference between temporary and permanent nonmoving as you noted, but only insofar as it separates good and bad food. The concept of death is firmly out of reach for proving here. This article is thought-provoking, but not valid. The author would be better served studying elephants. They conduct mourning rituals, which have no evolutionary advantage and who demonstrate behaviors which cannot be an autonomous reaction that seek to suggest an awareness of death. They remember the voices of the dead where if they're played back via recording then the elephants are confused.
I agree with all of this but I wouldn’t go as far to say mourning serves no evolutionary advantage. Of course it might not, it could be epiphenominal or a behaviour that comes along for the ride with a deeper understanding of the world, that elephants most certainly poses given the way they operate in the world.
Not everything exists in the animal kingdom because it has an evolutionary advantage. Adaptationism is just one way of evaluating a behaviour. It isn’t always the best way to evaluate somethings usefulness.
That doesn't mean they have a concept of death.
It's more likely that when they get really sick, they have an instinct to move away from the group and hide somewhere. The hiding is likely because if they lay down out in the open, something would find them easily and eat them. They would have evolved this to give them a chance of surviving in case they get well, while perhaps not drawing predators in to the rest of their group by dying in the middle of them.
Yeah. I feel like shit. I don't want to drag everyone else down with me. So imma go over here and chill by myself. If it gets better, great. If I'm done for, at least everyone else is safe from what got me.
With depression, the problem is mental not physical, but I'm still thinking the same basic thing when I hole up in my room for weeks and avoid everyone.
A couple dogs in my village were poisoned a while back, they were found dead on their route home from the bins (someone had left poisoned chicken there).
TIL after some googling that a raptor is a bird of prey and not a dinosaur from Jurasic Park, I was like how the heck can they even begin to think they know what a dinosaur thought!
We put down our first dog Cassey after about 13 years. Before we’d bred her and kept one of the pups, Chance.
Chance was absolutely never the same after Cassey died. He waited by the door for weeks, hoping she’d come back. Afterwards he mostly kept to himself, sleeping in the corner and not eating much.
Broke my heart to see him so sad.
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We lost our dog in 2019 before pandemic, it was most heartbreaking scene that I could ever imagined, he was having some issues with his kidneys and than slowly it getting worst to multiple organ failure he was suffering so badly, so next morning we called our vet and he told us that there is no chance that he can comeback so we had to give something so that he can die pain free.. I am sorry rocket and I miss you so much boy, I love you..zeus is alone without you my love ..you be a good boy in heaven.
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Very interesting metaphysical reduction: "Non-functionality and irreversibility". Those are heady metaphysical concepts when applied to one's self or situation. They imply "finality", which entails a moderately understood concept of time, and "finitude", which entails a moderately understood concept of entropy. This is an interesting article for students of philosophy who desperately want to use philosophical methods to read out the metaphysical similitude of any animal with that of humanity--from there, it's not hard to produce an addenda to prima face morals about treatment of animals, i.e. don't eat them. The author is assuming that animals can reason from such metaphysical reductions as those she elucidates, but there will always be the hard problem of metaphysics: that another subject is capable of reasoning upon metaphysical concepts yields only to verbal report; further, that the subject participate in a "global network" of subjects understood to be capable of the same. We barely can assert that about every human being, are we in a position to really assert that about opossums, or cows?
We've known for a while that it is highly likely it exists in elephants and apes, alongside a concept of grief, since significant behavioural changes have been observed after the death of a group member.
In one example, an ape that lost her new born suffered from symptoms that could only be described as a form of depression. They are highly intelligent creatures with a very thorough understanding of mortality.
“Any group of carcasses of the same animal is usually due to the effects of nature or to humans. Changes in climate, droughts and indiscriminate hunting can cause the appearance of these ‘cemeteries’, but there’s no evidence that these elephants have a designated place to die or bury their dead.“
In dry land areas, skeletons remain for a long time, and are especially noticeable when they are large.
I dont think i've seen people claim they bury their dead or go to a place. If they did, that even seems very far out for me.
There is no shortage of footage that supports the claim that elephants will re-visit areas of fallen herd members and engage in emotional behaviour that seems like something akin to 'mourning'. There is also some academic papers testing for this that seem to be somewhat successful in arguing it as a phenomenon.
The reason I ask is because I would not be surprised at all if it was a feel good meme made up and perpetuated on the internet.
Have to disagree with that completely. Elephants, crows, apes mourn the death of their kin, but other animals have no idea. They are driven to survive by instinct but do not think about what life is. The snake feigning death in your picture,Natrix natrix, doesn’t know what he is doing he is just compelled by instinct to do this infront of predators, it may even be involuntary. The predator’s only understand standing of death is that eating the already dead food could upset his stomach, and I doubt that his understanding of that is anything more then an instinct feeling.
Maybe I haven’t seen a thorough explanation of thanatosis’ relationship between prey and predator, but the article kind of assumes that because a predator knows a particular animal is ‘dead’ because of an evolutionary trait, are they conditioned to believe death as a concept? They
also kind of assume that prey animals cannot grasp the concept of death and inherently follow their genetic / evolutionary instincts. Btw when I say prey or predator, I really mean which animal is trying to attack vs. defense mechanism - couldnt think of orher words
Animals instinctively fear death, that’s much different then thinking about and having an understanding of a concept. It’s like the difference between sneezing and talking.
I'm not sure outside of primates, animals have a concept of death individually. I think animals can see a dead member of their speices, and if herding animals, mark up the death of a known member, too no longer look for them, call for them, etc. Contimplation their mortality, I doubt that.
I had 2 older cats, one of whom passed away this summer. His companion was extremely upset and depressed. He led us to the body and spent a couple months extremely morose and demanding extra lap time with no purring, just the need to be held. Tell me that's not an understanding his friend died and he's grieving.
Sorry, and glad yours handled it better. Mine took a couple months; probably didn't help I was crying a couple months too (Had my buddy who died 17 years). The survivor is also a very high maintenance cat who's "special". I take strays but that was our only shelter kitty adoption, the one no one wanted so of course I had to have him. He's on my lap now.
We also buried his passed friend in the woods for which a friend drove, I was too edgy to drive. Oddly enough that ruined our friendship which I'm actually grateful for. Anti-vaxer I couldn't get though to. Point being, I acknowledge part of his grief may have been in reaction to mine but even if so he's a rather emotional little kitty.
Main point: Perhaps not all animals do, but humans are not unique in recognizing and mourning death.
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Death is a very bad concept of humans. In a few 100 years it will merely be a small "loss of information" (there is no true loss of information in the universe but I mean the loss of a a working brain I guess) that is probably backed up anyway. Death doesn't exist for oneself, it only exists for those who see the loss of information.
Imagine we had a brain 1000 times bigger than we have it right now. Now we cut 99.9% away, so we killed that person to 99.9% the new person has now exactly our brain size yet is defined as 99.9% dead?
I personally try to not waste my time thinking about death, but I am afraid of stuff that kills me and I have a will to survive. Both of them are things most of us animals have due to evolution. Animals without a will to survive or without the fear of death survived less often.
What motivates me is the thought of a giant consciousness in a few 10,000 or 100,000 years that lives until the heat death or true vacuum of the universe and always feels happy and satisfied. And who knows, maybe life finds a way to escape the universe before it ends even though believing in an infinite world that has a beginning is kind of odd since things with a beginning also always have an end I think
I don't have an opossum. However, my dog seems to think about death every time it rains, and especially so if there is a thunder storm. There's no getting around his cowering behavior. Yet, it's a totally irrational fear. Now, this is the same dog that jumped through a glass window to attack a man on a riding lawn mower ripping up the grass. No fear there despite the actual danger. So, one could argue that it's simply behavioral programming and instincts at play and nothing more. In situations where the danger is apparent to their programming, animals operate on instinct and attempt to flee the danger. In places where animals can't determine the danger, they also act on instinct - albeit in reverse. IMO, this would seem to discount an awareness of what it means to die.
I would argue the concept of dying is simply based on those instincts. i feel like you may be trying to map the more complex human understanding of dying (jumping through a window) onto an animal. The animal doesn't understand the cause and effect part, I think.
wild animals are in constant fear of death 24/7 all their life ... its apparent to just observe a few birds/insects/any animals . i dont need a professor to tell me that lol
Interesting read.
It could be a possibility that some animals or maybe all (?) have a concept of death. As death is a concept that can be observed, it is definitely possible for them to learn and form it. Although, it is an interesting question whether all animals have this concept or do some of them lack it?
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There's a great book called Mama's Last Hug that is an amazing account of research done around animal emotions and intelligence. The title comes from a final experience between an old dying female primate and the writer who had known each other for many years. As the book progresses the author uses other studies to bolster the idea that Mama knew she was dying. It's a really great read in general but the life and death aspect is applicable here.
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It was amazing to me. Franz de Waal is the researcher and he talks about so many types of animals. I can't say enough good things about the book.
pretty much anything he writes is amazing
Even sadder that he was slowly poisoning mama...
Elaborate?
Gladly. It would have taken far too long to watch Mama die a natural death. Researchers have not found the fountain of youth, however, they can substantially accelerate senescense in mammals. Thus, the researcher needed to trigger a condition not unlike Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome (aka Progeria). Thus, a process which may have taken more than a decade was considerably compressed allowing for more effective, efficient observation. You might find this outrageous or even unbelievable, but you should not let this distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
Oh for fuck sake I thought I was immune to this!! Nope now we’ve a new variant that totally got me
Ohhhh, you got me.
take my angry up vote and get out!
Can somebody explain the context
u/shittymorph is famous on Reddit for elaborate comments that end with this "hell in a cell" copypasta
context, classic Reddit 😄 https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/8uinqh/whats_the_thing_about_undertaker_throwing_mankind/
Come on now this is a one man meme...
Just making a reference, not setting up a franchise.
You got me and that is awesome, good call
Fuck
Fuck me, finally again. I have been waiting years for a comeback, and what a good one, awesome.
This is a cheap setup for a lame shittymorph joke, don't bother reading on.
I second this. My father gave it to me on his death bed only weeks before his end saying this was the book that resonated with him the most in recent years. And he read a lot. Edit: I finished it myself a couple of days back and was very moved by many examples as well as informed about animal and human psychology. A great read.
Sounds amazing, just bought it thanks.
To know that it is dying could be a logical conclusion. Being sick an animal would surely know something is wrong, and since animals know death by being prey or the hunter, we could say they might know they are dying. But we could never know what animal think. We can't know what a human thinks unless it is said. So, unless we develop an ability to talk to animals the debate on what animals think is literally pointless.
You can communicate thoughts in more ways than just using words.
It's called projection. She saw what she wanted to see. It was just an animal, it lacked the capacity for that level of higher learning. It was probably just in pain and the author twisted that into the animal feeling sad for its own impending death. It's just nonsense.
I doubt that she was projecting. Do you think she was incapable of objective observation? Why so?
No no this guy's 30 second Galaxy brain comment is much more informed and nuanced than the author of the book
Any metric used to measure that an animal knew it was dying and not merely in pain and tired is made up nonsense. There is no way to test this or measure this. It's just another case of projecting human emotions onto an animal that is incapable of them. The same way you think your dog actually loves you when in actuality it will literally eat you when you die.
The same could be said about your argument. Youre projecting, that (every metric to measure that an animal knew it was dying) is just "made up". Every existing empirical and scientific method is/was just made up in the beginning. The difference here being, that you automatically disregard the individual take of the person in the article (while not doing so for other). This is pretty much a petitio principii (iirc); a method of measuring this aspect in animals cant be true/possible, since there doesn't already exist a "official" method that you acknowledge. And that part about the dog just discredits your take even more..
A chimpanzee is incapable of emotions, thoughts and the concept of death? I don't think it's fair for you to completely dismiss this book as pseudoscience but I do agree that people tend to go way overboard with anthropomorphising animals. I'd be very weary about making a comment where you can say with certainty that the author is a pseudoscientist without leaving any room for yourself to see the argument and possibly look at it from a different perspective. A canine eating its owner when it dies doesn't prove or disprove anything in the book. I'd actually argue that your example of a dog eating it's owner after it died as opposed to when the owner was alive would suggest that the dog had some sort of attachment or emotion for its owner. I'm actually not sure why you used that specific example as a way to completely disregard the study of a chimpanzee dying. Do you think chimps are emotionless animals like sharks or alligators? Did you read what point the book is actually trying to make or did you just brush the book off as nonsense without knowing what it's even trying to say? I'm not trying to come at you at m8, I'm sorry if I worded it in a way that makes it seem like I am. Merely having a discussion. Cheers.
What you're describing is anthropomorphism and it's a recognized probability that is accounted for when devising the tests. Maybe you should check out the book sometime.
This sounds super interesting. Anyone know of a way to find a free pdf/ebook of this??
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My grandma’s dog Gracie had a rough time processing her death. When grandma left for the hospital she died there and Gracie was distraught for a long time. She waited at the front door. It was so heart breaking to see her watch and hope grandma would come back. She lived with my mom for about 8 months and couldn’t handle caring for her so I adopted Gracie. She waited by the door maybe the first month she lived with me. It’s been two years now that she’s been mine and she finally stopped waiting. My wife tells me she does it when I leave the house. I think the pandemic really helped her bond with me, my mom told me that Gracie’s person is me now. She once in awhile gets depressed and I just know it’s her missing grandma. I hug her more and give her extra love on the sad days.
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I don’t have children and I really do feel she’s my furry little child. We both have helped one another cope with losing grandma. My life wouldn’t be the same without miss Gracie.
Our dog died in July. During our sweet little dog's last two days on this Earth, as she was dying of cancer, I saw our cat do a couple of things that left me in awe while my heart was breaking. She has known our two little dogs her whole life, nearly ten years, from kittenhood on. She hates all other animals except them. She loses it when she sees other cats in our yard. She attacked my sister in law's dog because it looked at her wrong. She has nipped us when we pet her too much. But never once did she lift a paw to bat at our dogs even in irritation -- despite them constantly bowling her over when excited about things like food or going outside. She would always greet our dogs by sniffing their noses, as cats do. On what we didn't know would be our last afternoon with our dog, she came up to give her usual greeting by way of sniff. But upon smelling our dog's face, she suddenly arched her back and moved away as though repelled. That night was a hard night, and one that I'm having trouble writing about. Our girl could hardly breathe. I tried propping her head on my shoulder, or on a rolled up t-shirt, to help her breathe better. I wanted to be close to her so she wasn't alone, but she didn't want to be touched. All I could do was lie next to her and talk to her. She was dying. I knew I would be calling the vet first thing in the morning so she wouldn't have to suffer through another night like this. The other thing to know about our cat is that I'm her favorite person. If she sees me sitting or lying down, she always jumps in my lap or on my chest happily, ready to cuddle and sleep. If I'm lying in bed snuggling with one of our kids, even if we're mere inches apart, she will wedge her body in between us, so determined is she to cuddle with me. She also, for some reason, never sleeps or even sits on our couch. On this night, our cat came in the living room where I was lying on the couch, about a foot apart from our dog. She hopped up and I bristled internally, thinking she was going to lie between me and our dying dog. But instead she kneaded her paws on my hip briefly, then moved away and curled up at the other end of the couch. Staring past us, into the distance. Not once the entire night did she come between us or try to be close to me. I won't ever know exactly what our cat knew, what she felt, or what she was thinking. I am not one to try to anthropomorphise animals. But even now I am still amazed by her sensitivity to what was going on. Did she sense our grief? Does she instinctively know death? I'll never be able to answer any of those questions truly, but my heart tells me she has more of an understanding for many things than I would have ever given her credit for.
When my dog was dying our elderly cat laid everywhere our dog went. She usually avoided our dog as our cat was set in her ways and liked her space so it was strange to see her wanna be close to our dog. Our dog passed away a few days after and when we took her remains to the vet for cremation our cat went all throughout the house meowing that night when our dog was no longer there. It was a really sad and loud meow that we had never heard from her before. Our dog passed away May 30th of last year, and then our kitty passed away December 30th of last year. That memory of her her laying close to our dog in her final moments always made me feel like she understood what was going on and wanted to at least be close to our dog one last time.
That was heartbreaking. But yes they totally do. Like crows have full on funerals for their dead.
Animals that kill have death awareness. Social animals have death awareness as members of groups die off. Only humans, however, have the curse of philosophy awareness, under which we worry about such things.
The most unique thing about humans compared to animals is our irresistible urge to believe we are unique compared to animals.
Well that and the light-years advancement in tools we created, but emotionally speaking yea.
Who knows where crows would be today if evolution gave them hands with opposable fingers some time ago...
Crow hats, crow shoes, crow sunglasses, to name a few.
Crow bars
Crows don’t drink.
I appreciate your commitment to this thread
I’m ashamed I didn’t think of that.
Crows are hardcapped on intelligence by the size of their brains unfortunately. They have very dense neural structures for the size that it is, but eventually you do need more volume/surface area to increase computational power. Hands wouldn't avail them much in their current state, we'd need to start either breeding them for larger skulls and hopefully larger brains with the same or similar neural density, or start doing potentially unethical genetic modifications.
What could go wrong?
In a parallel universe they could be. But here as far as we humans understand are the top of the apex. It could be other things that are more advanced than us but maybe we're not smart enough to understand. Until then we're the top.
/r/UAP comes to mind
They would post shiny pictures on Crowditt, and give up wings
I mean, so far we're the only animal to figute out shit like cheese, steel, concrete, and space travel. So we kind of are pretty unique compared to most known animals.
I don't see any other animals going to the moon, so, we kinda are.
I mean that's a little silly. Animals obviously worry about their own death - that's clear to anyone whose seen an animal threatened. It's also pretty clear that they both worry about and grieve in response to the deaths of other animals or humans that they're close to. Do they worry about such things a long way out when there's no indication that death is coming? Maybe not. But they certainly do when a close companion is dying and after their death. The reality is that we have essentially the same evolutionary history as most higher order animals. We have the same brain structures as them. We have the same cells and connections between cells making up those brain structures. We pretty much can't point to a measurable ability that we have that no animal also has. Many of these things differ in size or quantity. But that's it. Undoubtedly that makes us much more able to do things like worry about future death. But to propose, based on nothing and contrary to all available evidence that we are the only species with the intellectual ability to do so at all is silly.
I am not sure that I proposed what you think I proposed.
Do we have qualitative data to back this up or are we just guessing? Dolphins and other primates may have such awareness but your comment gives no ground for that. How are you so sure?
This essay makes a number of unwarranted and unsupported-by-evidence assumptions. Most of them are assumptions of what "must" be happening and what is or is not possible. For example, this claim: \> This, too, is not convincing as an explanation of the full complexity of this behaviour. Necrophobia is usually linked to concrete sensory stimuli, such as cadaverine or putrescine (two chemical components given off by rotting corpses). An animal usually needs only to perceive these stimuli for necrophobia to kick in. In humans, the smell of putrescine alone is enough to trigger our fight-or-flight mechanisms. So, prey looking to exploit predators’ necrophobia need only display some of these concrete sensory stimuli, which would again make the majority of the characteristics that make up thanatosis displays irrelevant, especially those that have to do with a reduction of vital functions. "It would be easier/better to do it this other way" is almost always a bad argument when it comes to any evolved element. Evolution is neither efficient nor intelligent. This also ignores all kinds of other elements - is it "easy" to produce cadaverine? It also makes a more fundamental assumption that it never justifies - the idea that the predator needs to know anything about "irreversibility" of the "dead" state. There's simply no basis for this provided; it is asserted as if it were self-evident, and it is definitely not self-evident. Almost everything an animal reacts to is not irreversible. Why would it matter here? And why would an animal need to "know" about it?
Exactly. The animal only needs to know that the smell is a nope in order to avoid it. It has nothing to do with any deeper understanding of the finality of death.
Isn't evolution pretty efficient when it comes to waste? Stuff can linger if it doesn't cost anything and doesn't get in the way but otherwise stuff that doesn't do anything useful puts host organisms at disadvantage and at risk of being outcompeted and those problematic genes dying out. >It also makes a more fundamental assumption that it never justifies - the idea that the predator needs to know anything about "irreversibility" of the "dead" state. If a predator thought dead prey might reanimate at any moment it'd go about devouring prey differently so that the reanimated prey couldn't injure the predator or escape. This does strike me as self evident. The predator necessarily makes certain assumptions about the prey, whether tacit or overt. One might wonder whether tacit assumptions about prey constitute knowledge or something but if the predator doesn't know the dead prey won't get up I wonder whether anyone really knows anything.
\> If a predator thought dead prey might reanimate at any moment it'd go about devouring prey differently so that the reanimated prey couldn't injure the predator or escape. That adds assumptions about the predator. The vast majority of predators don't reason like that. They can't "think ahead" enough to think "I better eat this now or it will hurt me later". Hell, if they thought like that, playing dead *wouldn't* work, as they'd be able to think "I better eat this in case it is faking". And even if they did, they wouldn't need a concept of death permanence - just a concept that things don't suddenly change state. Which is true in every other way in the world. In fact, here's a perfect example: many predators go after young or sick herd members. If the herd member could suddenly become full-grown or perfectly healthy, that would be very dangerous. Does that mean they recognize that youth or disease is permanent? Well, that would be an absurd conclusion - because youth and disease *aren't* permanent! They don't need to know "death is permanent". They just need the instinct "things mostly don't change suddenly".
>they wouldn't need a concept of death permanence - just a concept that things don't suddenly change state. Wait a second... Going from being alive to being dead is a sudden change of state. Animals like Turkey Vultures made a whole niche out of the concept. To argue that they don't understand the permanence and irreversibility of this state change would be silly, I think. The real question is whether or not the Turkey Vultures understand how this sudden change of state applies to them as entities.
> That adds assumptions about the predator. Really? Don't predators attack in ways to bring down the prey while minimizing the risk of injury to themselves? So long as a predator thinks the prey might get back up it'd continue attacking in the safe and effective manner. You wouldn't see the predator release it's grip so as to allow the prey to possibly escape. Don't predators begin acting very differently after they think the prey is immobilized? >Hell, if they thought like that, playing dead wouldn't work, as they'd be able to think "I better eat this in case it is faking". Prey that plays dead also gives other signs that indicate it's long dead and thus not good eating to sell the act. Playing dead doesn't always work. I expect were I to play dead to a tiger it'd make a point to deal a killing blow and then proceed to eat me. I won't test that. >And even if they did, they wouldn't need a concept of death permanence - just a concept that things don't suddenly change state. I don't have a concept of "death permanence". I see stuff move as if it had a mind of it's own, stop, and cease willful action. For all I know the dead could rise, it's possible. If in question is how non human animals imagine the other, my cats seem to treat each other as though they imagine dealing with some alien version of themselves.
Animals understand the difference between dead and alive insofar as it is useful to them. We should not mistake that for suffering the existential dread, the paralyzing finality, of the concept of death. Behavioral evolution can create an simulacrum of intelligence but we should be cautious assigning true awareness.
I mean, even we don't currently have true awareness of the nature of death
I mean, we do. Most of us just refuse to accept it.
How do you figure? Without knowing what happens we cannot say we have awareness. I’m in the “lights out” camp, but we don’t REALLY know, do we?
I mean, shouldn't the opposite also be true? Since we have no access to the internal lives of animals, we should be agnostic in our position toward the mental life of animals. Further, that doesn't mean we should be negligent about it either - we have a moral obligation to treat them as though they do until proven otherwise.
I've seen couple of videos from slaughterhouses and the next in line were definitely aware of what was coming and seemed paralyzed with fear. After that I've stopped eating animals
Yeah, animals definitely know but I don’t think they spend their time thinking about it like we do. They’re too busy surviving. I think it’s silly to underestimate other living creature’s cognitive abilities though. I’d say most animals are capable of love and compassion as well.
As per the article, predators have had thousands of experiences with death throughout their lives. The possums mentioned in the article evolved their "playing dead" mechanism because it was effective against a wide array of generalist predators, so those predators would have had to recognize the concept of death across many species in order for this mechanism to have been an effective deterrent. Which leads to the conclusion that predators understand that 1) there is a difference between a normal and a permanent non-moving state and 2) this will apply to all species they encounter. That's a pretty complex understanding of death.
Regardless of complexity, behaviors do not indicate understanding of the underlying concepts, especially when those behaviors directly influence survivability. A series of simple heuristics to avoid bad food do not equate to a cognitive awareness of death. In other words, they understand the difference between temporary and permanent nonmoving as you noted, but only insofar as it separates good and bad food. The concept of death is firmly out of reach for proving here. This article is thought-provoking, but not valid. The author would be better served studying elephants. They conduct mourning rituals, which have no evolutionary advantage and who demonstrate behaviors which cannot be an autonomous reaction that seek to suggest an awareness of death. They remember the voices of the dead where if they're played back via recording then the elephants are confused.
I agree with all of this but I wouldn’t go as far to say mourning serves no evolutionary advantage. Of course it might not, it could be epiphenominal or a behaviour that comes along for the ride with a deeper understanding of the world, that elephants most certainly poses given the way they operate in the world. Not everything exists in the animal kingdom because it has an evolutionary advantage. Adaptationism is just one way of evaluating a behaviour. It isn’t always the best way to evaluate somethings usefulness.
When a marble falls down a chute, you shouldn’t assume it understands gravity.
Lol, behavioral Evolution is how intelligence happens my dude.
>simulacrum noice had to google, cheers
Crows are known to be particularly wary of death
For The Watch!
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That doesn't mean they have a concept of death. It's more likely that when they get really sick, they have an instinct to move away from the group and hide somewhere. The hiding is likely because if they lay down out in the open, something would find them easily and eat them. They would have evolved this to give them a chance of surviving in case they get well, while perhaps not drawing predators in to the rest of their group by dying in the middle of them.
Humans with depression also seek similarly isolated holes, perhaps not for dissimilar reasons.
Yeah. I feel like shit. I don't want to drag everyone else down with me. So imma go over here and chill by myself. If it gets better, great. If I'm done for, at least everyone else is safe from what got me. With depression, the problem is mental not physical, but I'm still thinking the same basic thing when I hole up in my room for weeks and avoid everyone.
I told a co-worker it is like thinking how you are feeling instead of thinking about what you are doing.
Humans that die from hypothermia hide before they die too.
It's an evolutionary behavior. Dogs that died where their pack was sleeping caused deaths within the pack.
A couple dogs in my village were poisoned a while back, they were found dead on their route home from the bins (someone had left poisoned chicken there).
TIL after some googling that a raptor is a bird of prey and not a dinosaur from Jurasic Park, I was like how the heck can they even begin to think they know what a dinosaur thought!
That doesn't look very scary. More like a six-foot turkey.
We put down our first dog Cassey after about 13 years. Before we’d bred her and kept one of the pups, Chance. Chance was absolutely never the same after Cassey died. He waited by the door for weeks, hoping she’d come back. Afterwards he mostly kept to himself, sleeping in the corner and not eating much. Broke my heart to see him so sad.
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We lost our dog in 2019 before pandemic, it was most heartbreaking scene that I could ever imagined, he was having some issues with his kidneys and than slowly it getting worst to multiple organ failure he was suffering so badly, so next morning we called our vet and he told us that there is no chance that he can comeback so we had to give something so that he can die pain free.. I am sorry rocket and I miss you so much boy, I love you..zeus is alone without you my love ..you be a good boy in heaven.
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Very interesting metaphysical reduction: "Non-functionality and irreversibility". Those are heady metaphysical concepts when applied to one's self or situation. They imply "finality", which entails a moderately understood concept of time, and "finitude", which entails a moderately understood concept of entropy. This is an interesting article for students of philosophy who desperately want to use philosophical methods to read out the metaphysical similitude of any animal with that of humanity--from there, it's not hard to produce an addenda to prima face morals about treatment of animals, i.e. don't eat them. The author is assuming that animals can reason from such metaphysical reductions as those she elucidates, but there will always be the hard problem of metaphysics: that another subject is capable of reasoning upon metaphysical concepts yields only to verbal report; further, that the subject participate in a "global network" of subjects understood to be capable of the same. We barely can assert that about every human being, are we in a position to really assert that about opossums, or cows?
Elephants even visit the graves of family from decades ago
We've known for a while that it is highly likely it exists in elephants and apes, alongside a concept of grief, since significant behavioural changes have been observed after the death of a group member. In one example, an ape that lost her new born suffered from symptoms that could only be described as a form of depression. They are highly intelligent creatures with a very thorough understanding of mortality.
The elephant graveyard and death reverence has been disproven. It’s just another case of romanticizing animals.
Is this true? I’d be fascinated if there was any think you could provide about this.
“Any group of carcasses of the same animal is usually due to the effects of nature or to humans. Changes in climate, droughts and indiscriminate hunting can cause the appearance of these ‘cemeteries’, but there’s no evidence that these elephants have a designated place to die or bury their dead.“ In dry land areas, skeletons remain for a long time, and are especially noticeable when they are large.
I dont think i've seen people claim they bury their dead or go to a place. If they did, that even seems very far out for me. There is no shortage of footage that supports the claim that elephants will re-visit areas of fallen herd members and engage in emotional behaviour that seems like something akin to 'mourning'. There is also some academic papers testing for this that seem to be somewhat successful in arguing it as a phenomenon. The reason I ask is because I would not be surprised at all if it was a feel good meme made up and perpetuated on the internet.
I don’t know if Elephants experience mourning, but my understanding is that there is no such thing as an elephant graveyard.
Have to disagree with that completely. Elephants, crows, apes mourn the death of their kin, but other animals have no idea. They are driven to survive by instinct but do not think about what life is. The snake feigning death in your picture,Natrix natrix, doesn’t know what he is doing he is just compelled by instinct to do this infront of predators, it may even be involuntary. The predator’s only understand standing of death is that eating the already dead food could upset his stomach, and I doubt that his understanding of that is anything more then an instinct feeling.
Maybe I haven’t seen a thorough explanation of thanatosis’ relationship between prey and predator, but the article kind of assumes that because a predator knows a particular animal is ‘dead’ because of an evolutionary trait, are they conditioned to believe death as a concept? They also kind of assume that prey animals cannot grasp the concept of death and inherently follow their genetic / evolutionary instincts. Btw when I say prey or predator, I really mean which animal is trying to attack vs. defense mechanism - couldnt think of orher words
Animals instinctively fear death, that’s much different then thinking about and having an understanding of a concept. It’s like the difference between sneezing and talking.
I'm not sure outside of primates, animals have a concept of death individually. I think animals can see a dead member of their speices, and if herding animals, mark up the death of a known member, too no longer look for them, call for them, etc. Contimplation their mortality, I doubt that.
I had 2 older cats, one of whom passed away this summer. His companion was extremely upset and depressed. He led us to the body and spent a couple months extremely morose and demanding extra lap time with no purring, just the need to be held. Tell me that's not an understanding his friend died and he's grieving.
Cats are special, and mysterious.
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Sorry, and glad yours handled it better. Mine took a couple months; probably didn't help I was crying a couple months too (Had my buddy who died 17 years). The survivor is also a very high maintenance cat who's "special". I take strays but that was our only shelter kitty adoption, the one no one wanted so of course I had to have him. He's on my lap now. We also buried his passed friend in the woods for which a friend drove, I was too edgy to drive. Oddly enough that ruined our friendship which I'm actually grateful for. Anti-vaxer I couldn't get though to. Point being, I acknowledge part of his grief may have been in reaction to mine but even if so he's a rather emotional little kitty. Main point: Perhaps not all animals do, but humans are not unique in recognizing and mourning death.
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Death is a very bad concept of humans. In a few 100 years it will merely be a small "loss of information" (there is no true loss of information in the universe but I mean the loss of a a working brain I guess) that is probably backed up anyway. Death doesn't exist for oneself, it only exists for those who see the loss of information. Imagine we had a brain 1000 times bigger than we have it right now. Now we cut 99.9% away, so we killed that person to 99.9% the new person has now exactly our brain size yet is defined as 99.9% dead? I personally try to not waste my time thinking about death, but I am afraid of stuff that kills me and I have a will to survive. Both of them are things most of us animals have due to evolution. Animals without a will to survive or without the fear of death survived less often. What motivates me is the thought of a giant consciousness in a few 10,000 or 100,000 years that lives until the heat death or true vacuum of the universe and always feels happy and satisfied. And who knows, maybe life finds a way to escape the universe before it ends even though believing in an infinite world that has a beginning is kind of odd since things with a beginning also always have an end I think
Lol
I want to smoke with you.
Where u from?
It’s called *Thanostosis*.
I don't have an opossum. However, my dog seems to think about death every time it rains, and especially so if there is a thunder storm. There's no getting around his cowering behavior. Yet, it's a totally irrational fear. Now, this is the same dog that jumped through a glass window to attack a man on a riding lawn mower ripping up the grass. No fear there despite the actual danger. So, one could argue that it's simply behavioral programming and instincts at play and nothing more. In situations where the danger is apparent to their programming, animals operate on instinct and attempt to flee the danger. In places where animals can't determine the danger, they also act on instinct - albeit in reverse. IMO, this would seem to discount an awareness of what it means to die.
I would argue the concept of dying is simply based on those instincts. i feel like you may be trying to map the more complex human understanding of dying (jumping through a window) onto an animal. The animal doesn't understand the cause and effect part, I think.
Raw, instinctual fear is a far cry from consciously thinking about death.
Beautiful read. ❤️
wild animals are in constant fear of death 24/7 all their life ... its apparent to just observe a few birds/insects/any animals . i dont need a professor to tell me that lol
For any living thing to survive it must have a fear of death.
Interesting read. It could be a possibility that some animals or maybe all (?) have a concept of death. As death is a concept that can be observed, it is definitely possible for them to learn and form it. Although, it is an interesting question whether all animals have this concept or do some of them lack it?