Susana Monso in Time Magazine: 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.
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.
More here.
