The concept of death can trigger an existential crisis in humans. Do animals face the same fears? Susana Monsó is associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what animals know about dying – from mourning rituals to attempts at saving lives – and if this newfound understanding means we should treat animals differently. Her book is “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] The idea of death is something we’re confronted with every day in the headlines and true crime podcasts and violent movies. When we realize that yet again we have managed to kill a houseplant, many of us prefer to avoid dwelling on our own eventual demise. But the fact remains that we humans are keenly aware of death as a concept. But are we the only ones? From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. For a long time, we allowed ourselves to believe that an awareness of the possibility of death was one of those things that made humans unique. There’s no way of knowing if a bear or a snake or a bird goes about its daily business, knowing life is fleeting and these creatures don’t seem to mourn members of their own species who die in ways that look recognizable to us. But if we go beyond looking for humanlike rituals among other animals experiencing death, my guest finds significant evidence in numerous animals that they indeed have at least a minimal concept of death. Susana Monsó is associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at the National Distance Education University in Madrid. Her book is called “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.” Susana, welcome to Think.
Susana Monsó [00:01:17] Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Krys Boyd [00:01:20] Before we get into what other species comprehend about death, I mean, we should acknowledge it can be a challenging concept even for humans, right? Understanding the physical cause of death doesn’t answer why for us.
Susana Monsó [00:01:32] Yes, absolutely. I think this is something that I myself forget sometimes because I’ve been working on this for so long that I forget the emotional significance that death has for for us humans. And it’s happened to me more than once that I’ve killed the mood of a dinner party by talking about my research on these topics, because people do have very deep feelings about this subject, and that in turn, well, makes makes it difficult for us to cope with the reality of it.
Krys Boyd [00:02:06] One point this book makes is that we ought to proceed with caution in using our selves for comparison to figure out what it is that animals understand. What are some things that ants do that might remind us of our own responses to death?
Susana Monsó [00:02:22] Yes. So ants can discriminate dead individuals from alive ones, which is something that we also can do. And we’re fairly, fairly good at it. And and ants can also be fooled into thinking that one of their own is dead when she’s actually alive, which is also something that could happen to us. Right. We could mistake someone who are in a coma or unconscious for dead. And actually, back in the day, coffins used to come with little bells in case someone was mistakenly taken for dead and buried alive. So we are not infallible when it comes to discriminating death, but we’re certainly better at it than an answer. Actually. Very easy to be to be fooled with regards to death. So what they do is that they engage in this behavior that’s called Necrophoresis, which consists of taking those individuals who have died outside of the nest and into the refuse pile, which is outside of the colony. And while this suggests that they can discriminate dead individuals from alive, once we know that they do this based on the detection of certain chemical cues given off by corpses. An example of this is oleic acid. And if we were to take oleic acid, if we were to put a drop of it on a little pebble or a leaf or even a live ant, the other ants would take it as though it were a dead individual and they would pick it up and take it out of their nest so they can be fooled. But we can be fooled as well. But they can be definitely more easily fooled.
Krys Boyd [00:04:08] So what might look to us like some kind of funeral ritual is really just a response to this chemical signal. Like they don’t have a choice. Once they perceive that signal, they remove that individual.
Susana Monsó [00:04:19] That’s right.
Krys Boyd [00:04:21] So you think an ant probably doesn’t have a concept of death? Because is it because an aunt isn’t capable of having concepts at all?
Susana Monsó [00:04:31] I mean, yes, partly that’s that’s part of the reason, definitely. But also because her behavior just shows us that she’s not really understanding what death is. I mean. In order to to have a concept of death. It’s not just enough to be able to discriminate death based on certain very immediate cues in the environment. You have to be able to understand what it means for someone to die, at least on some level. So you have to be able to make certain inferences. For instance, if I know that someone has died, I know that I’m not going to see them tomorrow, for instance. That’s an inference that I can make. And so if, for instance, I have a corpse in front of me and then suddenly that corpse stands up and starts moving, I’m going to be very surprised and shocked because it’s going against what I understand to happen with death. But we don’t have an indication that ants have this kind of ability. So what they show is simply an automatic reaction to certain chemical cues, and they don’t seem to be able to learn to better discriminate death when when they make a mistake, which is something that a human would do, a human. If we were to make a mistake, then we might in the future, we might be more careful when it came to discriminating that someone had died.
Krys Boyd [00:06:02] One reason I love talking to philosophers on this show is you can think that you’ve gone all the way back to the beginning of something, and then inevitably you can go back a little further. So in order for some animal species to be capable of a concept of death, they have to have minds. What does it mean to have a mind?
Susana Monsó [00:06:22] Well, that is a very difficult question because there are many senses of the word mind. So some people understand mind to be something equivalent to consciousness. So the the being something it is like to be an animal. But usually the term mind is usually used to to refer to what allows us to think, right. What allows us to have flexible behavior, to think to a problem and come up with a solution. So that’s usually what we what we understand by the term mind. And when it comes to thinking, the tools that we use in our thought are usually concepts. We sometimes use other tools, but concepts are involved in our thinking. So if you don’t have a mind, you’re not going to have concepts. So that’s why we need to start by thinking, Well, do animals have minds?
Krys Boyd [00:07:27] And a mind with a concept needs to be able to recognize a thing, an entity without some sort of sensory stimulus. So that, if I understand correctly, is a strike against ants having the ability to have concepts even though they routinely do a thing that looks like they are choosing to bury their dead.
Susana Monsó [00:07:48] Yeah. So the idea is that concepts give you some distance from environmental stimuli. If you’re just showing a behavioral reaction to one of the same stimulus, if you’re always reacting that way, you don’t really have a concept. All you have is like a preprogramed reaction to a stimulus. But concepts give us some distance. So, for instance, with the concept Dog, I can recognize a dog using many of my senses. So I. I can go into a house and it can smell dog and I can know, there’s a dog here, or I can hear a bark. And I can think that there’s a dog around. I can also visually recognize a dog even when they look very different. So I can classify both a Chihuahua and Doberman as a dog, even though they are really, really different. And this means I have some distance from environmental stimuli. And it’s because I have a concept that unifies all of these ideas and allows me to call that those different things a dog.
Krys Boyd [00:08:55] So what is the difference between one of these fixed or kind of stereotypical responses to stimuli and a cognitive reaction to death?
Susana Monsó [00:09:05] Yeah. So. So stereotypical reactions to deaths are reactions that are like the and snicker voices. So they are innate, which means you’re born with them. They’re kind of automatic. You can’t really help but. But having these reactions, they’re also homogenous within a species. So all different members of your species are going to show the same reaction to the stimulus. And this contrast with cognitive reactions to a stimulus, which are reactions that you’re not born with but are rather the result of your lived experiences. Whatever you have experienced in the past that has made you who you are today. We know that there are cognitive reactions to death in a species whenever we see a big variation in the ways that they react to one in the same stimulus. I mean a corpse.
Krys Boyd [00:09:59] So in other words, the term stereotypical is interesting here. It may be confusing for people because we imagine like it’s stereotypical for people to cry when they learn that a relative has died. But we’re not we’re not talking about that in this case. That is actually a cognitive reaction to death because some people might cry. Some people might scream, some people might feel no emotion.
Susana Monsó [00:10:20] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Stereotypical it’s a weird term. Maybe it’s used differently in this context. So it’s just meant to, to refer to these sort of preprogramed reactions to a stimulus. And humans, for instance, have some stereotypical reactions to death. An example of this is necrophobia. So necrophobia is an aversion to corpses that is very widespread in the animal kingdom. And think about how you can’t help but react with disgust when you come across food that is full of mold. This is a necrophobic reaction, and it’s there to protect us from pathogens because anything that’s decomposing is dangerous to us. And so, necrophobia is going to be present in all humans. And you have to sort of work to get rid of that necrophobia. Like some humans because of the kind of work they do or whatever, they might become desensitized to these stimuli. But but most of us are going to have these reactions.
Krys Boyd [00:11:25] So even human decisions based on cognitive responses and culture, things like burying our dead, may have originated with this kind of necrophobia that is wired into us by evolution.
Susana Monsó [00:11:39] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m not an expert on the origin of human funerary practices, but that definitely makes sense to me as a story of why burying began. Because corpses might have been I mean, they would have been something that generate that disgust. And so probably our our ancestors found different ways of getting rid of these stimuli. Yeah.
Krys Boyd [00:12:07] It’s not surprising that when we want to compare other animals understanding of death with ours, we look for behavior in response to death that looks familiar. What was so remarkable about the orca who was called Tahlequah, who had a calf that died soon after birth?
Susana Monsó [00:12:25] Yeah. So she appeared in news outlets all over the world in the summer of 2018 because she gave birth to a calf who tragically died shortly after being born. And she was seen carrying this baby for 17 days and over 1000 miles. And this is really remarkable if we think that orca’s don’t have hands. So she had to balance this baby that weighed hundreds of kilos on her snout. And so the motivation behind this behavior must have been incredibly strong.
Krys Boyd [00:13:03] So that’s really interesting to us. And there may be interesting things to discover, but we cannot assume that what looks to us like a mother grieving her baby is necessarily that.
Susana Monsó [00:13:17] Yeah, we always have to be careful when it comes to theorizing about what’s going on in the minds of animals. Beware of what they call anthropomorphism, which is the unjustified attribution of human like qualities to animals. And you know that the case of Tahlequah certainly looks like grief. And it’s very, very tempting to describe it that way. But we do have to be careful and make sure that that’s the only or like the the best explanation for her behavior.
Krys Boyd [00:13:52] Susana, scientists want to be careful to avoid anthropomorphism in studying animals, reactions to death or anything else, because we can make mistakes by thinking what looks just like human behavior must be motivated in the same ways. On the other hand, is it also a mistake to assume that nothing animals do that looks like human behavior could be motivated by the same things?
Susana Monsó [00:14:16] Yes, absolutely. So there is a term that I really like that was coined by Kristin Andrews and Brian Huss, which they call anthropectomy. Now, anthropectomy is sort of the other side of the coin with regards to anthropomorphism. So if anthropomorphism is the erroneous attribution of a human like quality to an animal, anthropectomy would be the erroneous denial of a human like quality to an animal. So, for instance, if we say of Tahlequah, the orca, that she’s grieving, what she’s actually not, we would be anthropomorphizing, like, well. But if we were to say that she can’t be grieving because she’s in Orca and only humans grieve when she’s actually grieving, then we would be anthropectimizing Tahlequah. And what Anderson has say is that both anthropomorphism and anthropectomy are errors. They are false descriptions of reality, and there’s no reason to fear one over the other. And I really like this idea because there’s a big emphasis in science or comparative psychology on avoiding anthropomorphism, but there’s not enough of an emphasis on avoiding anthropectomy. And they’re both mistakes that we can make in our investigation, and we should be wary of both.
Krys Boyd [00:15:35] Has the pendulum sort of swung in both directions over time, like toward anthropomorphism than maybe too far away from it?
Susana Monsó [00:15:43] Yes, absolutely. When when we first started discussing the animal mind, this was especially led by George Romanus, who was a disciple of Darwin. And you can also see it in Darwin’s writings on animal minds. There was a lot of anthropomorphizing for sure. You you can see some descriptions of animal behavior and how they interpret what was going on. And it’s, you know, it’s kind of shocking to read with our eyes now how how this could have been taken for a scientific text because they really describe their behavior using human terms without much care to not be mistakenly describing it as human. And so there was a big backlash against this. And psychology for many times was dominated by the behaviors paradigm where scientists would just describe the behavior of animals in aseptic terms and not speculate about what might be going on in their minds. And then after some point, scientists realized that this wasn’t good either, because there were points there were moments where you just had to invoke some inner workings inside the animal’s brain to explain the behaviors that you saw. And so there was this cognitive revolution that allowed us to now be talking about the psychology of animals, but were still wary of falling into the original anthropomorphic speculation. And so I guess we’re now sort of trying to work in this middle ground.
Krys Boyd [00:17:33] What can we learn and what can we not know for sure from the story of a chimpanzee named Lucy?
Susana Monsó [00:17:42] Yes. So, Lucy is a chimpanzee who lives in the jungle. And she was seen carrying out a very interesting behavior. She was seen play parenting the corpse of a Bush baby. Bush babies are these monkeys that have the very big eyes. These nocturnal monkeys and chimpanzees usually love to eat these animals. They are really a very preferred item of food for them. But she didn’t eat the Bush baby. She didn’t show any motivation to eat it. And instead, what they saw was that she was pretending to be its mother. So she was she was grooming it. She was carrying it like chimpanzee mothers carry their babies. She was sleeping next to it. And yet they also saw her play parenting the corpse of a baby from another female of the group that she stole. So she seems to really like to do this. And what is interesting about Lucy is that she is she appears to be sterile. So she has never been witnessed giving birth or being pregnant. So it seems like she has this unfulfilled desire to be a mother. And it may be why she is carrying out these behaviors, because chimpanzee females, when they’re when they’re little, they they tend to play parent, but they do it with like pieces of wood and things like that. They sort of imitate the mothers of the group. But Lucy’s surprising in that she was much older and she was doing it with with corpses and even the corpse of an individual from another species. So this is very strange. And there’s also the question of whether she understood that the babies that she had were dead. Right. So in my book, I try to argue that the concept of death is quite easy to acquire. So we can expect that Lucy actually understood this, but somehow it’s still she still found it fulfilling in some way to carry out this behavior.
Krys Boyd [00:20:02] The concept of death may be easy to acquire for some animals, and it may not require like a complete intellectual understanding on par with the human adult. You know that human children don’t they’re not born with the concept of death. They don’t fully get it until they reach a certain age and a certain amount of life experience. So a concept of death is not all or nothing.
Susana Monsó [00:20:28] That’s right. I think often in debates on whether animals understand death, the concept of death has been construed in these binary terms like all or nothing. Like either they understand death like a human adult does, or they they lack all concept of death. And this isn’t a very fair way of posing the question, because when it comes to human, children’s, human children, sorry, we do admit degradation. So we do admit that that we don’t develop this concept overnight, that it takes us quite a while to actually fully grasp what it means to die. So this sets sort of a double standard that’s not very fair. But also I think it’s just not a very interesting way to to frame the question. If we’re thinking whether animals have a concept that’s equivalent to the human adults, when human adults have all this cumulative culture of symbolisms and narratives surrounding death. Of course, their concept is not going to be as complex as ours. That’s just not a very interesting question. I find it much more interesting to ask whether they have anything that counts as a concept of death, and that’s why I defend that we should start from the minimal concept of death and then see how complex it actually turns out to be in other species.
Krys Boyd [00:21:47] So let’s talk about what that minimal concept requires. Animals, first and foremost, need to be generally able to distinguish living bodies from dead ones. What are some ways they might demonstrate the ability to do that?
Susana Monsó [00:22:01] Yeah, we need some ability to discriminate, right? But it doesn’t have to be infallible because, as I said, even humans. Make mistakes, right? We are not infallible. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t understand this. If, on the other hand, we made a mistake every single time, then clearly we wouldn’t really understand what this means. So we do need some capacity to discriminate it. But this doesn’t mean that we need to have any particular emotional reaction or any particular behavior. We just need animals to show some difference in treatment with regards to dead and alive individuals. So we need to see them either treating dead individuals differently from alive ones or changing their behavior when an individual dies. Switching from one behavior to another once there’s a death, this shows us that they can discriminate, that they can sense that something has happened.
Krys Boyd [00:23:03] Does a minimal concept of death require an animal to understand that once something is dead, it can’t come back to life?
Susana Monsó [00:23:14] Yes, in a way, because I think that the minimal concept that death is constituted by the notions of non functionality and irreversibility. So this is basically the idea that dead beings don’t do the sorts of things that living beings typically do and that this state cannot be reversed. So this means understanding that the individual cannot come back to life, but not in a way that presupposes any kind of like understanding of infinity or being able to mentally time travel into the future or anything like that is just having an expectation of certain behaviors if an individual is alive and then once they are dead, understanding that these that these behaviors are not going to happen. So that updating your expectation and no longer expecting those behaviors to happen, that is already an understanding of irreversible non functionality.
Krys Boyd [00:24:15] Okay. Does that minimal concept of death require an animal to understand that every living thing eventually dies? Or is that kind of next level thinking?
Susana Monsó [00:24:24] Yeah, exactly. So minimal concept of death just requires you to be able to understand what has happened to an individual who has effectively died. So you have a corpse in front of you and you can grasp, okay, this individual that I have in front of me is not going to stand up. He is not going to move. He’s not going to make noises. He’s not going to chase me. He’s not going to run away, etc.. But this doesn’t mean that you can predict that this is going to happen to other individuals around you. That would be, as you said, the next level in understanding death. So being able to make predictions and like classify other individuals as being beings who can also die and being able to maybe also link it to certain causes. So, for instance, if I saw this individual die because he encountered a leopard, then I might be able at some point, if my concept of death develops, I might be able to predict that, you know, if these other individuals were to encounter a leopard, then they might also die.
Krys Boyd [00:25:32] Susana, some animals will be frightened of, say, other animals, predators or things that they feel somehow might harm them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they know that that are running with that animal could kill them. Right.
Susana Monsó [00:25:49] That’s right. So evolution has equipped us with with a certain innate fear of certain stimuli. So this this happens to us as well, where, for instance, fearful of sudden loud noises or sudden unexpected movements. And we need these sorts of innate fears because the world is very dangerous. And, you know, evolution has equipped us with these fears because it’s a good way to guarantee that our genes will pass on. Right. A gazelle who wasn’t fearful of sudden movements is not going to survive for very long.
Krys Boyd [00:26:35] Humans often respond with very recognizable grief behaviors when someone dies that they care very much about. Is it possible for animals to have what resembles a grief response without having some minimal concept of death?
Susana Monsó [00:26:51] I mean, that is that is a good question. I’m inclined to think that it is possible because I think that I’m following anthropologist Barbara King here who thinks that grief is just sort of the other side of love. So if you love someone and you lose them, you’re going to grieve. And you don’t necessarily need to understand what happened. That individual might just have disappeared and you might just intensely miss them and you might grieve their loss that way. I don’t necessarily think that a concept of death needs to be involved here, but I know that not all philosophers would agree. I mean, philosophers never agree with each other anyway. But a lot of philosophers think that grief does need like this cognitive understanding that someone has died. And it’s they they do conceive it as like an emotional process that that involves processing the fact that someone has died and that and that that needs to be part of it. And they would perhaps construe these other cases as cases of separation anxiety or things like that. I think in part, this is a terminological dispute. What I am more interested in pointing out is that is precisely what you said, that we can see behaviors in animals that look very much like mourning, that might not have that might not incorporate an understanding of death and might simply be be caused by the fact that this animal was very closely bonded to another individual and that individual is no longer there or is not responsive.
Krys Boyd [00:28:39] What can we note Susana about animals that might sense impending death for a companion? You write in the book about like a pod of dolphins that worked together to keep another dolphin afloat when it was ailing?
Susana Monsó [00:28:54] Yeah. So for what? For what I understand is the minimal concept of death. It’s very important to have some notions of of the typical behaviors of beings of a certain kind, right? Because concepts always come in sort of nets of concept. You can you can never have a concept on its own that just wouldn’t make sense, right? You need other concepts to make sense of your concept. So in order to have a minimal concept of death, you need to have like a minimal concept of life. Otherwise, any old rock that were irreversibly nonfunctional would count as dead. But we don’t want it to count as dead. And the reason for this is that it’s not alive. Right? So we need the animal to have like some expectation of life towards a certain animal. And then once you grasp that it’s dead, then she can update her expectations and no longer expect certain behaviors. So basically, the reason why I’m saying this is because the sorts of behaviors, the sorts of care behaviors that we see directed towards individuals who are dying or who are hurt can show us that these animals are processing, that something is not okay, that the animal is not behaving like she usually would.
Krys Boyd [00:30:20] Susana so far we have talked mostly about a concept of death in the context of animals who have, like lost one of their own species. But of course, there are animals that have to kill or find something dead in order to eat. Can we assume that predators and carrion eaters have a minimal concept of death?
Susana Monsó [00:30:42] So I think we need to. And so in general, yes. Or like many of them will. But we also need to distinguish between different kinds of predators and different kinds of carrion eaters. So with regards to predators, some are what are called sit and wait predators, and they have what looks like very severe typical reactions to their prey. So, for instance, think of, you know, a toad who’s just sitting there. And then when something flies by that looks like a certain shape and a certain size, she just lets out her tongue and catches it. Right. There’s not much thinking involved here. This seems to be like a pretty automatic reaction. But this contrasts with hunting predators, predators who have to actively stalk their prey. And these tend to be quite cognitively sophisticated, and they have to monitor the functionality of their prey. They have to monitor their behavior, and they have to sense whenever an individual is not doing well, either because they’re very old or they’re race or they’re very young, or maybe they’re sick or they’re injured. And so this already primes them towards having an understanding of when the individual is not displaying any behaviors at all. Right. In addition, these animals have a very strong emotional incentive to prey, to pay attention to to the moment that a prey has died, because prey animals are very often very dangerous and predators tend to have very low success rates because of this evolutionary arms race that goes on between predators and prey. So the moment a prey dies and they’re no longer a threat and they can no longer escape is going to be very salient to the predator. And also predators, especially if they’re carnivores, they’re going to have daily opportunities to learn about death. And so, you know, everything is going to be there in place for them to develop a minimal concept of death. And I think that they are extremely good candidates for developing one with respect to scavengers. I have a suspicion that things might be a little bit different because they don’t have to hunt their prey, but rather they have to find it. And so this might mean that they are primed to pay attention to certain cues, that they’re attracted by certain smells or certain visual features in the environment and that they might just be attracted to them. And that’s what leads them towards their their meals. But for sure, if they live long enough, they’re also going to be animals who have many, many experiences with death and that they might even develop this this sense that an animal is close to dying. Right. And so they might also eventually develop a concept of death. I think they will also be quite good candidates.
Krys Boyd [00:34:02] Okay. Your book is called Playing Possum, which is a reference to the fact that this is an animal that is known to display death like behaviors as a defense against predation. But this doesn’t necessarily mean possums know what they’re doing right? Can you explain the behavior known as Thanatosis.
Susana Monsó [00:34:22] Yes. So this is one of my favorite behaviors in the animal kingdom. So the Virginia opossum, she plays dead whenever she feels threatened, but she plays dead in a way that’s absolutely spectacular. So she doesn’t just adopt the bodily and facial expressions of a corpse. All her bodily functions are reduced, so her body temperature drops, her breathing and her heart rate are reduced. She expels this putrid smelling liquid from her anal glands, and she just stops responding to the world. So you could pick her up, you could pinch her, and she just wouldn’t react. So she really looks very impressively dead. She also she also opens her mouth and her tongue hangs out and her tongue turns blue. It’s usually pink, but it turns blue. So it’s a very, very convincing display. Very convincing performance. But as you said, it’s likely that they don’t understand what they’re doing. This reaction is probably automatic like for us, whenever we are in a scary situation, our pupils dilate or our hair stands on end. And this is an automatic reaction that we can’t control or may not even be aware of.
Krys Boyd [00:35:42] So are opossums sort of programed by evolution to is it akin to human fainting? Maybe in a very stressful situation?
Susana Monsó [00:35:52] So humans actually go into something similar? Not not quite. It’s so it’s called tonic immobility. This is a very widespread reaction in the in the animal kingdom. So it’s a sort of paralysis that we can go into in situations of extreme stress when we feel that there are no fight or flight options. So this is something, for instance, that happens to victims of sexual assault, that they sometimes become paralyzed, that they freeze and they literally cannot move. This is something that probably exists because it’s a way of playing dead. But in the case of the opossums and other animals like hog nosed snakes, what we see is a more developed form of this capacity that likely evolved from tonic immobility. But it’s much more complex because it involves all this active mimicry of death. So hog nosed snakes, for instance, they precede their death displays with a dramatic death during which they they ride the radically on the ground until they they lie belly up with their mouths open, their tongue hanging out, and even secreting blood from their mouths. So this is much more than just the paralysis that we can go into.
Krys Boyd [00:37:16] A lot of what we know about animals, deaths surrounding behaviors. I mean, I’m curious about how it gets studied because animals traditionally live in the wild. Scientists can go out in the wild, but they’re very presence sort of affects the environment in which animals are behaving. So talk a little bit about experimental versus anecdotal evidence and and what plays into what we think we know about animals understanding of death.
Susana Monsó [00:37:47] Yeah. So this is an important question because this is for sure a topic that’s very, very hard to study, especially if we want to study it ethically. So it’s usually considered that the best evidence about animal cognition comes from studies in the lab. So in the lab, you can perform experiments under controlled conditions where you can place an animal in a situation that you have very carefully designed and study the animal’s reactions to this. And by tweaking the experiment, you can really get very close to understanding what exactly is driving the animal’s behavior. But when it comes to studying animals relationship with death, this of course becomes much harder because there are, thankfully, ethical constraints that prevent us from just killing an animal in front of another animal to see how she reacts. So some things can be done in the lab, but there are definitely limits to what we can do. So a lot of the evidence that we have comes from field studies. So in field studies researchers, I really admire them for doing this because it’s really hard work. They go to the field and they spend sometimes months studying a population of animals, and they’re usually not studying death related behaviors because death is too random a phenomenon for them to be able to study it properly or like for them to have a study that’s on their death related behaviors. But they do sometimes do this when when when they’re dealing with a population that has very high mortality rates for whatever reason. So sometimes they do do this. But usually what happens is that the researchers are studying a population in search for other phenomena. They’re studying them for other purposes, but they come across an instance of an animal dying and they document the reactions of other members of the group to this phenomenon. And this is what is known as an anecdotal report. So it’s the report of a single case, an anecdote that was witnessed. And it’s usually thought that anecdotes are the least reliable form of evidence because you can’t really control anything that happens. And it’s very difficult to to know what is going on inside the minds, inside the minds of the animals that you’re observing in that moment. But when it comes to studying animals, relationship with death, it’s really the best we have if we want to be ethical about it. And so what we what is happening now is that we’re gathering many, many anecdotal reports. And it’s at a certain point. These many anecdotes, you know, become data once you’re seeing, you know, a certain amount of monkey mothers carrying their dead babies, you start to realize that this is not just a random thing that happens, but rather something that is quite common. So, you know, this is a way in which we can we can fight against these sort of opportunistic and anecdotal character of these of these reports is by gathering as many of them as we can.
Krys Boyd [00:41:16] Susana. Humans maybe are the only animals that go through life with an understanding of the inevitability of death and of our own death specifically. Do you think this knowledge makes our lives better or worse?
Susana Monsó [00:41:34] That is a very good question. Yeah. I mean, we often sort of construe ourselves as superior because we have this knowledge, but I am not sure how much of a blessing it actually is, especially in our contemporary Western societies where we just don’t cope well with death, with like we are all aware that it’s inevitable, we all know it’s going to happen to us. But at the same time, it is such a taboo in our societies. It’s it’s just very bad taste to talk openly about death. So it’s very bad taste for a woman to talk about a miscarriage she’s suffered. It’s bad taste to comment that someone that everyone knows is dying is dying, or if someone tells us that they have a terminal illness, we don’t even know how to react. So we struggle a lot with this idea. There’s even a whole discipline within psychology called terror management theory that is like trying to understand how we deal with this impending doom and how how we cope with the inevitability of our mortality, because it’s really something that that we struggle a lot with. So what we often do is, yeah, we turn it into taboo, we push it to the back of our minds, and then in the end, it’s just it’s there, but it’s also not there because we go through our lives pretending like we’re not going to die and we don’t really stop to think about it that much. And so I’m not sure that it in the end, it it really makes a significant difference to our lives as, as maybe it should. Like maybe if we were more aware of it, if we were more at peace with it, we would go through our lives in a different kind of way.
Krys Boyd [00:43:32] It’s almost like we share this collective desire to go back to before we evolved to perhaps be the only creatures that understand we will die someday.
Susana Monsó [00:43:41] Yeah. I mean, I think it’s it’s it’s an important question, you know, because we are now developing all these tools to talk with animals, you know, like these buttons that people are using to communicate with their dogs. And there is this question of like, should we teach them about death or is it actually a blessing for them to not know that they will inevitably die? And I’m not sure what the what the answer is, because certainly our way of dealing with death is not a healthy one. But I think that there probably are healthy ways of coping with the inevitability of death. So I’m not sure how we could transmit that to a dog. But yeah, there you go.
Krys Boyd [00:44:30] Susana Monso is associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at the National Distance Education University in Madrid. Her book is called “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.” Susana, this has been fascinating. Thank you for making time to talk.
Susana Monsó [00:44:47] Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s been a real pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:44:50] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and wherever you get podcasts by searching for KERA Think or go to our website. Think.kera.org to learn about upcoming shows and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
