Our neighbor’s cat, Mittens, was an adventurer who used to sneak into our house whenever the opportunity presented itself. His other hobbies included daily games of tag with his fellow cats on the block and getting into backyard brawls with raccoons. When he went missing a few weeks ago, our own cat started behaving differently. Usually silent and regal, she became clingy and would wail while she stared out the window. “She’s in mourning,” my husband said. We assumed Mittens was dead. Did our cat “assume” the same thing?
Talking about animals and mourning invites inevitable charges of anthropomorphism, that tempting habit of projecting human characteristics on to a nonhuman animal. But as Susana Monsó explains in “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” our fear of anthropomorphism can lead to the opposite sin of “anthropectomy” — the denial that an animal exhibits humanlike characteristics. “Both mistakes are equally serious,” Monsó writes. “They are both false descriptions of reality.”
Monsó is a Spanish philosopher (she translated her book herself), and “Playing Possum” keeps returning to questions of knowledge: what humans know; what animals know; and what humans (may or may not) know about what animals (may or may not) know. Monsó stops such lofty conundrums from floating away into the stratosphere by tethering them to intriguing anecdotes from the natural world — a chimpanzee that carries around the corpse of a bush baby; pregnant mice that reabsorb their fetuses into their bodies to avoid the predations of infanticidal males; ants that can be tricked with chemical markers into treating live ants as dead ones.
I also learned from this book that “playing possum” involves more than simply becoming immobile; when an opossum feels threatened, “she stops responding to the world and starts to salivate, urinate, defecate and expel a repugnant-smelling green goo from her anal glands,” Monsó writes. This seems a lot more involved than just “playing”: Expelling stinky goo is definitely committing to the bit. Monsó compares the imperiled opossum to Schrödinger’s cat, “dead and alive at the same time.”
“Playing Possum” is an unexpected mix of witty and grisly, cerebral and earthy. Monsó doesn’t so much answer questions about death as raise new ones, encouraging us to shed our reflexive anthropocentrism by paying close attention to what animals do, even when it fails to accord with human modes of behavior.
Some animals do appear to experience grief, Monsó says, referring to female giraffes wandering about the area where a calf had died and to peccaries repeatedly grooming a dead peccary’s corpse. She opens the book with a striking photograph from a chimpanzee rescue center that went viral in 2009: A dead chimp named Dorothy is being pushed in a wheelbarrow past a group of her fellow chimps, who are uncharacteristically silent while they stare at her, seemingly solemn and transfixed.
Were the chimps grieving? Did they know that what had happened to Dorothy would one day happen to them? Monsó frames her book in terms of the “philosophy of animal minds.” She realizes that for skeptical readers “who doubt that animals even have minds” such an approach might seem a hard sell. But her enthusiasm for her (admittedly morbid) subject is so winning that by the end of the book I was persuaded that many nonhuman animals do indeed have a “concept of death,” even if it isn’t necessarily the same as our own.
Grief indicates an affective bond with the deceased. But Monsó cautions that an awareness of actual death need not be a proximate cause. Grief can be caused by “the mere absence of a loved one.” We tend to conflate grief with an understanding of death because of our “emotional anthropocentrism,” Monsó argues. “Given that grief is the prototypical human response to death, we expect animals that understand death to exhibit grief, but this need not necessarily be so. In the same way that there can be grief without a concept of death, there can be a concept of death without grief.”
Monsó points to other responses to death that are more prevalent among nonhuman animals in the wild, including cannibalism and necrophilia. She says we should consider the role that violence plays in animals’ lives. For predators, the death of their prey “is a reason for joy.”
But when we wonder about an animal’s understanding of death, we are usually talking about the death of “conspecifics” — members of an animal’s own species, not members of species that an animal has evolved to kill. I don’t need a philosopher to tell me that my cat rejoices when she kills a mouse. Death is extremely common in the nonhuman world. What I had not previously considered was its connection to play. Monsó includes a graphic description of the methods that bottlenose dolphins will use to torment and kill harbor porpoises. It’s not as if this behavior is a form of predation; the dolphins do not feed on their porpoise victims. Researchers speculate that such seemingly gratuitous “harassment” gives dolphins a chance to hone their fighting techniques and bond with one another.
Monsó ends her book by highlighting a paradox: Humans have a sophisticated understanding of death, one that includes its “inevitability and unpredictability”; yet we are constantly trying to distract ourselves from this terrifying knowledge. Animals in the wild cannot escape this reality, and Monsó suggests we might learn something from them. “We’re not a unique species,” she reminds us. “We’re just another animal.” Maybe denying our mortality is our warped version of playing possum; we get so caught up in hiding from death that we don’t really live.
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