Do animals understand what it means to die?

We know that animals often behave in particular ways toward dead members of their own species. Ravens and crows gather and make loud calling noises. Chimpanzees in the Taï Forest in Africa have been seen covering dead bodies with leafy branches. In 2015, when a wild female chimpanzee died, the male she had been in a relationship with for three and a half years prevented young individuals from approaching her while he “performed several close-contact and caretaking behaviors.” Some primate mothers carry the body of their dead infant for days or weeks, or eat parts of the mummified corpse. Elephants have been seen gathering around, interacting with, or carrying the bodies of their babies. Dolphins sometimes keep dead bodies afloat, and in 2011 a beluga whale mother carried her dead calf for around a week…

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When interpreting animal behavior, there’s always the risk of anthropomorphism, or projecting human-like emotions and thoughts onto nonhuman animals. But there could still be ways to probe whether animals have a concept of death with philosophy’s help, by defining what a concept of death is at a bare minimum, and combining observations of animals in the wild with experiments in the lab.

Learning whether animals can grasp such concepts will help us to better understand their minds, and it could have important implications for the ways we treat them. But grappling with the concept of death is a trait long considered to belong to humans alone. Showing that animals can grasp it too—even on a smaller scale—would mean we’re not alone in engaging with our mortality.

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