Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

Today's post is by Susana Monsó who presents her new book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death (Princeton, 2024). 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 specialises in philosophy of animal minds, animal ethics, and philosophy of comparative psychology.

Humans have traditionally thought of themselves as the only animals with a concept of death. Yet, recent years have witnessed a surge of studies that suggest that we may not be the only ones intrigued by this phenomenon. A chimpanzee was seen cleaning the teeth of the corpse of an adolescent of her group with whom she was closely bonded, crows will gather around the bodies of deceased conspecifics to learn about the circumstances of their death, elephants calves have been discovered seemingly buried by their elders, an orca mother was seen carrying her dead baby for seventeen days and over one thousand miles.

In my book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, I argue that properly studying animals’ relationship with death requires us to overcome two biases that plague contemporary debates on the topic.

Susana Monsó

The first of these biases is what I term intellectual anthropocentrism. This is the idea that the only way of understanding death is the human way. Intellectual anthropocentrism has led to an overintellectualisation of the concept of death, which has been linked to very demanding capacities, such as a theory of mind, abstract thought, a concept of absence, or analogical reasoning. 

I argue instead that beginning from humans’ hypercomplex concept of death means putting the cart before the horse and that, if we want to study whether animals can grasp this phenomenon, we need to begin by investigating whether they have a minimal concept of death. Understanding death minimally just means being able to apprehend that dead individuals don’t do the sorts of things that living beings of their kind typically do and that this is a permanent, irreversible state.

The second bias that we need to overcome is emotional anthropocentrism. This is the view that the only emotional reactions to death that deserve our attention are human-like reactions. Emotional anthropocentrism has led to an excessive focus on grief when investigating animals’ responses to death. As a remedy for this, I emphasise that grief is just one out of a myriad of emotional reactions that death can trigger, and that if scientists only report cases of apparent mourning behaviour we would be neglecting an important proportion of relevant phenomena.

The author with the book!

If we cast aside intellectual and emotional anthropocentrism, I argue, it becomes clear that the concept of death doesn’t require very sophisticated cognition and that there is a wide variety of pathways that an animal can follow to come to grasp it. As a result, it is to be expected that the concept of death will be widespread in nature.

Playing Possum is the culmination of a research project titled ‘Animals and the Concept of Death’, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). It was originally published in Spanish under the title La zarigüeya de Schrödinger, and the English translation is also a revised and updated edition. Earlier formulations of my views on the topic can be found in my articles ‘How to tell if animals can understand death’ and ‘Death is common, so is understanding it: The concept of death in other species’ (co-written with Antonio Osuna-Mascaró).