Animals Understand Death Too! Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading a story dated 2018 when field researchers in Uganda came across an unusual sight: a female chimpanzee carrying an infant she had recently given birth to that was affected by albinism, an extremely uncommon condition in this species that gives their fur a striking white color.  The scientists were able to document the reactions of her mates when they first encountered the infant.  Instead of curiosity and care that newborns tend to elicit, the chimpanzees reacted with what looked like fear, with their fur on end and emitting the kinds of calls that signal potentially dangerous animals.  Shortly after, the alpha male, together with a few of his allies, killed the little one.  Upon his death, the behavior of the chimpanzees radically changed, and the apes, overtaken by curiosity, began to investigate the corpse, entranced by this being what smelled like a chimp, but looked so different.  This tragic story is one of the best pieces of evidence we have that chimpanzees can understand death.  The key here lies in their shift in attitude.  What at first was perceived as a threat, transformed into a fascinating object.  It was as though the chimps had processed that the unusual animal could no longer hurt them.  This is precisely what understanding death means: grasping that a dead individual can no longer do what they could when they're alive.  Some scientists who study animals' relations to death might disagree with this conclusion.  Understanding death, they might argue, implied comprehending the absolute finality of it, its inevitability, its unpredictability, and the fact that it will affect everyone, including oneself.  These scientists would be in the grip of what I call intelletual anthropocentrism: the assumption that the only way of understanding death is the human way, that animals either have a concept of death equivalent to the average adult human's - or none at all.  This bias affects the field known as comparative thanatology, the study of how different animals deal with and understand death.  But it couldn't be further from the truth.  Nor is it the only bias that affects the field.  What I call emotional anthropocentrism is the idea that animals' reactions to death are only worthy of our attention when they appear human-like.  This bias leads researchers to look for manifestations of grief in animals; famous examples include the story of Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead baby for 17 days and over 1,000 miles, or Segaira, the gorilla who attempted to suckle it's dead mother's breast despite already having been weaned.  Don't get me wrong: animal grief is real.  However, if we're looking only for mourning behavior, we may be missing most of the picture.  Think back/ to the chimps.  They weren't mourning the baby's death.  But this did not detract from their understanding of what had happened.  Grief is not the only signal of an understanding of death.  In fact, there are many ways of emotionally reacting to the realization that someone died that doesn't involve grieving.  You might react with joy if, for instance, you inherited a large sum of money.  You might instead react with anger, if the deceased owed you money that you're now never going to get back.  Or you might be totally indifferent, if you didn't know the person or they meant nothing to you.  Of course, all of these reactions are taboo in our societies, and we wouldn't publicly admit to having them.  But this doesn't mean that they're not possible.  And crucially, they shouldn't mean that you haven't properly understood what happened.  The polar bear that finally manages to catch a seal might understand death just as well as the heartbroken monkey mother, even though the former thinks of it as a gain rather than a loss.  Our preconceived notions have prevented us from seeing that they are many more ways of reacting to death than what is considered politically correct in our society.  In fact, an understanding of death, instead of being a complex intellectual achievement, is actually quite easy to acquire.  If we manage to get past our own all too human biases, we will see that the possible meanings of death are more diverse than we will ever know.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.