Photo: Shahd Safii

What animals mourn their dead?

Because mourning is not limited to big-brained cetaceans (whales and dolphins) or primates – scientists have documented some form of “death response” in seals, manatees, dingoes, horses, dogs, housecats, and more.

bbcearth.com - The truth about animal grief | BBC Earth

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Darwin himself thought other animals capable of emotions such as happiness and misery, and stories of elephants mourning the dead were recorded by Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD). Yet for much of the past two centuries scientists and philosophers were extremely hesitant to describe the behaviour of any animal towards one of their dead as “grieving”, for fear of anthropomorphizing – to attribute human traits, emotions, or intentions to animals. Over the course of her research, Dr King began to feel “that we were straight-jacketed intellectually by our fears of anthropomorphism”, so she created a set of criteria: “If a surviving animal who had a close relationship to the newly deceased becomes socially withdrawn, failing to eat and sleep and travel in routine ways, and shows species-specific evidence of emotion – then we can see widespread evidence of an emotional response to death in animals.” The increase in scientific evidence for grief and mourning in other species has grown so much over the past decade, the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal B devoted an entire issue to responses to death in both animals and humans, with the proposal to define an entire new field of study: “evolutionary thanatology” . The ultimate goal: not simply cataloguing the range of behaviours across the animal kingdom and human cultures, but “developing a more explicit evolutionary consideration of all aspect of studies of death and dying”.

After all, if it is said “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” then the question begs to be asked: Why should grief exist at all?

When mourning, both animals and humans behave in a variety of ways that are simply not useful to survival: withdrawing into solitude, retreating from socialising, sleeping less, eating less, foraging less, mating less, and if spending time tending to a corpse, exposing oneself to pathogens and making oneself vulnerable to predators. Taken to the next level in human cultures, with the amount of land we devote to cemeteries, the time and money we devote to funerals, and the profound pain we experience with loss, grief is even more draining – and puzzling.

What can be gained from grieving?

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Certain experiences in life may be painful, but that doesn’t necessarily make them maladaptive. When we experience physical pain from a cut or a burn, that pain is an evolved response signaling to us to remove ourselves from the source of pain. Pain is useful. People born with a congenital insensitivity to pain tend to die young, accruing incessant injuries and infections. Pain is useful. But what can be gained from grieving – from retreating from the world, neglecting sleeping and eating?

In this light, understanding when, why, and how animals respond to the dead doesn’t just teach us about animal sentience, or our own evolution – it helps us understand the phenomenon of grief itself. Because mourning is not limited to big-brained cetaceans (whales and dolphins) or primates – scientists have documented some form of “death response” in seals, manatees, dingoes, horses, dogs, housecats, and more. Striking examples include 27 adult giraffes holding a vigil for one dead baby giraffe, elephants from five different families visiting the bones of one of the dead, a group of 15 dolphins slowing their speed to escort a mother dolphin carrying her dead calf, and a strange case of two ducks rescued from a foie gras farm who formed a friendship at their sanctuary home. When one duck died, the other lay with its head on the others neck for hours. Though charismatic mammals make headlines, responses to death can also be seen in non-mammals – such as birds, like the foie gras ducks, and wild scrub jays observed in the field.

bbcearth.com - The truth about animal grief | BBC Earth

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