Death is common, so is understanding it: the concept of death in other species
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Death is common, so is understanding it: the concept of death in other species Susana Monsó1
· Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró2
Received: 3 June 2020 / Accepted: 16 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Comparative thanatologists study the responses to the dead and the dying in nonhuman animals. Despite the wide variety of thanatological behaviours that have been documented in several different species, comparative thanatologists assume that the concept of death (CoD) is very difficult to acquire and will be a rare cognitive feat once we move past the human species. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is based on two forms of anthropocentrism: (1) an intellectual anthropocentrism, which leads to an over-intellectualisation of the CoD, and (2) an emotional anthropocentrism, which yields an excessive focus on grief as a reaction to death. Contrary to what these two forms of anthropocentrism suggest, we argue that the CoD requires relatively little cognitive complexity and that it can emerge independently from mourning behaviour. Moreover, if we turn towards the natural world, we can see that the minimal cognitive requirements for a CoD are in fact met by many nonhuman species and there are multiple learning pathways and opportunities for animals in the wild to develop a CoD. This allows us to conclude that the CoD will be relatively easy to acquire and, so, we can expect it to be fairly common in nature. Keywords Comparative thanatology · Nonhuman animals · Concept of death · Grief · Anthropocentrism · Predation · Thanatosis
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Susana Monsó [email protected]
1
Unit of Ethics and Human-Animal Studies, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria
2
Unit of Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria
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Synthese
1 Introduction Comparative thanatologists attempt to uncover the proximate mechanisms involved in the responses to the dead and the dying across animal1 species, as well as the ultimate functions behind these mechanisms. This area of study is filled with difficulties, given that ethical constraints make the use of experiments particularly tricky (Gonçalves and Biro 2018; Monsó 2019), and so scientists must rely more than usual on opportunistic observations gathered in the wild. Despite these methodological hurdles, comparative thanatologists tend to agree on the idea that the concept of death (hereafter, ‘CoD’) is an unusual cognitive feat once we move beyond the human species. For instance, despite the growing number of thanatological reports gathered on monkeys, who show huge variability in their reactions to death, De Marco et al. assert: “there is no reason to believe that monkeys have a concept of death” (De Marco et al. 2018, p. 58). Similarly, after a detailed review of the evidence, Gonçalves and Carvalho state that great apes —our closest living relatives—are the “likeliest candidates for achieving aspects of a human-like concept of death,” but at the same time “the burden of proof sti
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