Animals' Understanding of Death

This is a Spain news story, published by Gizmodo, that relates primarily to Susana news.

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Animals Understand Death

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animal cognition research

Gizmodo

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Gizmodo talks to Spanish philosopher Susana Mons3 about the ‘romantics and killjoys’ of animal cognition

Summary

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69% Informative

Susana MonsÃ, a Spain -based philosopher, has written a book about how animals understand the concept of death.

Her book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death , was first published in Spanish in 2021 .

She discusses the emerging field of science that seeks to understand how animals view and react to death.

MonsÃ: Comparative cognition is wary of anthropomorphism and anthropomorphizing animals.

The opossum engages in a very elaborate death display whenever she feels threatened.

She goes into what’s called thanatosisâthis death feigning where she incorporates all sorts of signals of death.

For predators, for instance, death is not a loss. It means that they’re going to have a full stomach that night.

The opossum is a good piece of evidence that there are predators in the world with a concept of death, whose cognition has acted as a selection pressure.

MonsÃ: The more elaborate the display, the more convincing it was, the less likely it would be that she would get eaten, and so the more likely she would reproduce.

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Informative language

Neutral language

Article tone

informal

Language

English

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Offensive language

possibly offensive

Hate speech

not hateful