Susana Monsó chats with Ars about her new book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.
Human beings live every day with the understanding of our own mortality, but do animals have any concept of death? It's a question that has long intrigued scientists, fueled by reports of ants, for example, appearing to attend their own"funerals"; chimps gathering somberly around fallen comrades; or a mother whale who carried her dead baby with her for two weeks in an apparent show of grief.Philosopher Susana Monsó is a leading expert on animal cognition, behavior and ethics at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain. She became interested in the topic of how animals experience death several years ago while applying for a grant and noted that there were a number of field reports on how different animal species reacted to death. It's an emerging research field called comparative thanatology, which focuses on how animals react to the dead or dying, the physiological mechanisms that underlie such reactions, and what we can learn from those behaviors about animal minds."I could see that there was a new discipline that was emerging that was very much in need of a philosophical approach to help it clarify its main concepts," she told Ars. "And personally, I was turning 30 at the time and became a little bit obsessed with death. So I wanted to think a lot about death and maybe come to fear it less through philosophical reflection on it."Her years of research turned into a book, now translated into English: Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death (Princeton University Press). In thoughtful prose peppered with lively anecdotes, Monsó tackles our all-too-human anthropocentric biases surrounding death and deftly outlines a useful philosophical framework for understanding animal cognition to illustrate how a minimal concept of death might be possible, even if it differs among species. She argues that far from being an exclusively human attribute, a concept of death is actually quite widespread throughout the animal kingdom."We're not the only animal who understands death, nor are we the only one who grieves, nor the only one who kills on purpose or for fun," she writes. "Scientists have been trying for a long time to find a characteristic that will definitively separate us from the other species. So far all candidates have fallen. Neither the use of tools, nor culture, morality, or rationality are exclusive of human beings. Nor is the concept of death."Ars chatted with Monsó to learn more.