2 days Ago By The Guardian
In 2017 an eight-year-old student named Dante de Kort set up a camera trap outside his home in Prescott, Arizona, as part of a science fair project. He directed the camera towards a dead female peccary, a small boar-like creature found in woods throughout the Americas, in the hope that he would capture coyotes feasting on the corpse. Instead, his camera recorded footage of what was widely interpreted to be a mourning ritual.
Over 10 days, other peccaries visited the corpse, nudging it, sniffing it, grooming it, and even snuggling next to it. “They’re smart,” De Kort told reporters. “They come back for their dead, they mourn for their dead, and they actually care about each other.
” Powerful images such as this leap out of Spanish philosopher ’s new book, Playing Possum, an engaging inquiry into animals and their notions of mortality. There are stories not just of peccaries, but ants that transport their dead from the nest; an orca whale who carried her dead calf more than a thousand miles; and the creature of the book’s title, a small marsupial that can transform itself into a living corpse in order to make a predator reconsider its choice of lunch. What emerges is an illuminating, if complex, guide to looking at our non-human cousins, a celebration of the richness of animal minds, and a reminder of the delusions and conceits of our own.
As an academic philosopher, Monsó is careful, almost painfully so, to clarify terms. For her, the understanding of death is best thought of as a spectrum. At one end, there sits what she calls a minimum concept of death, which must hold two ideas, those of non-functionality and irreversibility.
A peccary no longer does what it does, and will not do so again; and this must in some way be understood by its fellows. She argues that ants, which remove their dead fellows from nests, do not possess a concept of death: theirs is a “stereotypical” reaction to the presence of oleic acid in corpses. Other species, such as chimpanzees, grasp death cognitively, and will display varied emotional reactions to the loss of family members, just like the peccaries.
Monsó acknowledges that her definition of death is a low bar, and a far cry from human notions of mortality, but in an intriguing section on our own species, she shows that many of the things we might consider to be prerequisites for understanding death, such as universality (we all die), are not always accepted. It is not even clear that we understand what it means to no longer exist. She quotes : “try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it.
The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.” There is much in this book about , but Monsó’s interest really lies in the lens through which we view non-human life: the intellectual and emotional baggage that we all carry when, say, we witness a peccary cosying up to a dead family member and use words such as “care” and “mourn”. She vigorously critiques the academic study of death in the animal kingdom, a recent field known as comparative , highlighting the ease with which our observations and conclusions can be skewed, coloured by anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism and anthropectomy (that is, the mistaken denial of our similarities with animals).
Although Monsó draws on the findings of comparative thanatology, she does not endorse its methods, which have included everything from snaring ants to presenting elephants with the skulls of their dead relatives. On reading about some of these studies, the effect is not so much to marvel at the minds of other species, but to confront the cruelty, hubris and wrongheadedness of our own. This is not an easy book to read.
It is full of macabre (and relatively uncommon) stories of unsettling animal behaviours that would ruin an episode of Planet Earth: a tonkean macaque in an Italian zoo gnawing on the decomposing corpse of its baby; a German shepherd chewing the flesh off its dead owner’s face. Noting my own reactions to these passages, I asked myself whether we can truly scrub the lens through which we view these images, objectively entering the minds of the animals in question. Monsó offers up such scenes in a breezy style and relies on gallows humour, and yet this is itself a distancing technique, an acknowledgment that it is perhaps impossible or inadvisable to get too close to certain subjects.
Monsó ends her book by undermining the distance between us and non-human life. “Neither the use of tools, nor culture, morality, or rationality are exclusive [to] human beings,” she writes. “Nor is a concept of death.
We’re not a unique species. We’re just another animal.” She hopes that this knowledge may help us come to terms with our own mortality, but I remain in the grasp of Unamuno’s tormented dizziness.
Death is the great leveller, goes the proverb, meaning that we all come to an end; we all decay, and disappear, human or non-human. But this book made me read the proverb differently: it may be that, for all philosophy’s definitions and concepts, we are unable to make sense of our own ends; and this may also be true for our non-human cousins. • Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó is published by Princeton (£22).
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