Brad Wilson of The Atlantic: In a discipline that is small but has literature dating back to Aristotle, some scientists ask one existential question, Ross Andersen writes: Are animals as haunted by death as we are? https://theatln.tc/eShgHmxM
Comparative thanatology, the study of how animals experience death, is hampered by certain practicalities. Scientists “cannot interview animals (or at least not yet). They can monitor their hormonal shifts—baboon cortisol levels spike when they lose someone close—but these can be triggered by other stressors,” Andersen writes. “They don’t give us the texture and grain of their grief, if indeed it is grief that they feel.” So far, the best results have come from years’ or decades’ worth of work studying the behavior of animals with long lifespans—“the usual suspects: nonhuman primates, whales, and elephants,” Andersen continues.
“Humans have spent months in steamy jungles or zoo enclosures, dodging feces, to pursue this work,” he writes. “We are death-obsessed animals, after all, and have been since the dawn of recorded history, if not before.” Human cultures have devised richly symbolic rituals to precede death and to follow it, something that is not passed down through our genes.
“Comparative thanatologists aren’t really in the business of giving answers, at least not yet,” Andersen continues. “We can only hope that by continuing to watch chimps, we will notice new behaviors that betray a bit more of their interiority, or at least give us new grounds to speculate.”
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