Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

by Susana Monsó

cogent

With this, a new discipline was born: comparative thanatology, which aims to study how animals react to individuals who are dead or close to dying, the physiological processes that underlie their reactions, and what these behaviors tell us about the minds of animals.

anthropocentric

Concepts, therefore, have six main characteristics: (1) they allow us to discriminate the entities to which they apply with some reliability, (2) they entail a certain amount of knowledge regarding the semantic content of the term in question, (3) they vary across individuals, cultures, and moments in time, (4) they allow us to make inferences, (5) they are not linked to concrete sensory stimuli, and (6) they don’t generate a fixed behavioral response. If an animal doesn’t display these characteristics in her abilities and behavior, it means she lacks concepts.

With anecdote compilations like these, the idea that neither deception nor altruism are exclusive to human beings gained more credibility. They also helped scientists to take more seriously the possibility that animals could engage in these types of behaviors, which led to them being more systematically studied in the lab.

If anthropomorphism is the mistaken attribution of a human-typical characteristic to an animal, anthropectomy would be the mistaken denial of a human-typical characteristic to an animal.

For the minimal concept of death to be a concept, it has to fulfill the six conditions I set out in the second chapter: (1) it has to allow the animal who possesses it to distinguish dead entities with some degree of reliability, (2) it has to come with a certain understanding of what philosophers of language call the semantic content of the property of being dead, (3) it has to leave room for a variation across cultures, species, and individuals, (4) it has to allow for inferences to be made with it, (5) it can’t be linked to a concrete sensory stimulus, and (6) it mustn’t generate a fixed behavioral response. This way, we will ensure that animals that are only capable of stereotypical reactions to death won’t count as possessing a concept of death.