Oct 1, 2024 06:52 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 1, 2024 07:27 PM by C C.)
https://gizmodo.com/do-animals-understan...2000505062
EXCERPTS: Few things have earned as much as thought and attention in the collective human mind as death. For as long as we’ve had the capacity to express ourselves through words and other forms of communication, the subject of death and dying has loomed ever present. But Susana Monsó, a Spain-based philosopher, argues that while humanity’s particular flavor of fascination and dread at the notion of death may be unique, our perception of it actually isn’t.
Her book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, was first published in Spanish in 2021 but has now received an update and a revised English translation that will be out later next month. In the book, Monsó discusses the emerging field of science that seeks to understand how animals view and react to death. And she makes the strong case that humans are far from the only animals to know the meaning of dying, even if our vocabularies differ. Gizmodo spoke to Monsó about the origins of her book, the “romantics and killjoys” of animal cognition research, and why the possum’s ability to play dead reveals so much about how other animals grasp the nature of mortality. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
[...] Gizmodo: You point out that scientists and philosophers have only recently started to seriously study how animals respond to death, a field known as comparative thanatology. Why has it taken people, and particularly experts in cognition, so long to see animals as capable of understanding it?
Monsó: Comparative cognition in general is really wary of the dangers of anthropomorphism and anthropomorphizing animals. Many years ago, before the cognitive revolution, psychologists weren’t even talking about the mental states of animals. They were just describing their behavior. And even though behaviorism is supposed to be a thing of the past, I think it still has some presence today, or at least some of its underlying assumptions are present in fields like contemporary comparative cognition. And I think that has a lot to do with the tendency of a lot of people to want to stay away from topics that sound very human-like, toward topics that could lead us to engage in anthropomorphism. That’s my guess. And this means there are several topics that it’s taken a while for scientists to take seriously, even nowadays.
[...] Gizmodo: You talk about lots of animals throughout the book, but it’s not until the end that you actually discuss the critter in your title, the humble possum [In North America, “possum” is colloquially used to refer to the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), though a related but distinct group of marsupials found in Australia are also often called possums as well]. Why are these marsupials in particular an important illustration of how death might be widely seen throughout the animal kingdom?
Monsó: Basically, in my book, I’m trying to argue that the concept of death is easier to acquire than we usually presuppose, and then we can expect it to be fairly widespread in nature. And the opossum provides one of the best pieces of evidence that we have of this, and that’s because she engages in a very elaborate death display whenever she feels threatened. She goes into what’s called thanatosis—this death feigning where she incorporates all sorts of signals of death. She adopts the bodily and facial expression of a corpse. Her body temperature drops. Her breathing and heart rate are reduced. She secretes this putrid smelling liquid, and she stops responding to the world. And if you didn’t know in advance about her little trick, you would be fooled by it for sure. Now, the opossum doesn’t necessarily understand what she’s doing. For her, this reaction is probably analogous to when we are in a state of fear and our pupils dilate, or our hair stands on end, and we’re not controlling this. We’re not even aware of this, but it happens automatically. For the opossum, it’s probably something like that. It’s probably also an automatic process. However, we need to have a reason why this defense mechanism evolved and why it has the shape that it has.... (MORE - missing detail)
EXCERPTS: Few things have earned as much as thought and attention in the collective human mind as death. For as long as we’ve had the capacity to express ourselves through words and other forms of communication, the subject of death and dying has loomed ever present. But Susana Monsó, a Spain-based philosopher, argues that while humanity’s particular flavor of fascination and dread at the notion of death may be unique, our perception of it actually isn’t.
Her book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, was first published in Spanish in 2021 but has now received an update and a revised English translation that will be out later next month. In the book, Monsó discusses the emerging field of science that seeks to understand how animals view and react to death. And she makes the strong case that humans are far from the only animals to know the meaning of dying, even if our vocabularies differ. Gizmodo spoke to Monsó about the origins of her book, the “romantics and killjoys” of animal cognition research, and why the possum’s ability to play dead reveals so much about how other animals grasp the nature of mortality. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
[...] Gizmodo: You point out that scientists and philosophers have only recently started to seriously study how animals respond to death, a field known as comparative thanatology. Why has it taken people, and particularly experts in cognition, so long to see animals as capable of understanding it?
Monsó: Comparative cognition in general is really wary of the dangers of anthropomorphism and anthropomorphizing animals. Many years ago, before the cognitive revolution, psychologists weren’t even talking about the mental states of animals. They were just describing their behavior. And even though behaviorism is supposed to be a thing of the past, I think it still has some presence today, or at least some of its underlying assumptions are present in fields like contemporary comparative cognition. And I think that has a lot to do with the tendency of a lot of people to want to stay away from topics that sound very human-like, toward topics that could lead us to engage in anthropomorphism. That’s my guess. And this means there are several topics that it’s taken a while for scientists to take seriously, even nowadays.
[...] Gizmodo: You talk about lots of animals throughout the book, but it’s not until the end that you actually discuss the critter in your title, the humble possum [In North America, “possum” is colloquially used to refer to the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), though a related but distinct group of marsupials found in Australia are also often called possums as well]. Why are these marsupials in particular an important illustration of how death might be widely seen throughout the animal kingdom?
Monsó: Basically, in my book, I’m trying to argue that the concept of death is easier to acquire than we usually presuppose, and then we can expect it to be fairly widespread in nature. And the opossum provides one of the best pieces of evidence that we have of this, and that’s because she engages in a very elaborate death display whenever she feels threatened. She goes into what’s called thanatosis—this death feigning where she incorporates all sorts of signals of death. She adopts the bodily and facial expression of a corpse. Her body temperature drops. Her breathing and heart rate are reduced. She secretes this putrid smelling liquid, and she stops responding to the world. And if you didn’t know in advance about her little trick, you would be fooled by it for sure. Now, the opossum doesn’t necessarily understand what she’s doing. For her, this reaction is probably analogous to when we are in a state of fear and our pupils dilate, or our hair stands on end, and we’re not controlling this. We’re not even aware of this, but it happens automatically. For the opossum, it’s probably something like that. It’s probably also an automatic process. However, we need to have a reason why this defense mechanism evolved and why it has the shape that it has.... (MORE - missing detail)
