How Animals Grieve

Barbara J. King

21 annotations Aug 2023 – Oct 2023 data

5

  • Chimpanzees and elephants feel grief. Pioneering women field scientists Jane Goodall, observing chimpanzees in Tanzania, and Cynthia Moss, studying elephants in Kenya, reported years ago firsthand observations of the sorrow these animals felt at the death of loved ones.
  • In his book, Kessler put it this way: The longer I spent with our goats, the more complex and wonderful their emotional life seemed: their moods, desires, sensitivity, intelligence, attachments to place and one another, and us. But also the way they communicated messages with their bodies, voices, and eyes in ways I can't try to translate: their goat song.
  • The sequence of steps taken by these chickens is remarkable. They recognized that a companion was in trouble; they knew where to seek help from the human world and how to get a human's attention; and in an embodied way, they directed that human immediately to the source of the trouble.
  • One hen, old and nearly blind, was assisted by a second who was young and in fine shape. The younger hen collected food for her companion and helped the older one settle into a nest at night. Then the old hen died. The younger one stopped eating and weakened. Within two weeks, she too had died. Chickens think and feel. They grieve.
  • When an animal feels love for another, she will go out of her way to be near to, and positively interact with, the loved one, for reasons that may include but also go beyond such survival-based purposes as foraging, predator defense, mating, and reproduction.

11

  • Research shows that in rhesus macaques, a close relative of the toques, mothers and infants share what's called reciprocal face-to-face communication. This suite of behaviors between moms and babies involves smacking of the lips, mouth-mouth contacts, and, most significant of all, sustained mutual gaze.
  • Sugiyama and his coauthors pose a key question: Does the carrying of dead infants signal maternal emotion or does it instead point to the mothers' lack of awareness that their infants have died?
  • What does it mean that mothers carried infants significantly more often if the death occurred within thirty days of birth? It was especially common if the infant lived more than one day but died within several days; as Sugiyama's group notes, this pattern matches up with the time when the infant, not yet able to move around well on her own, begins to cling and breast-feed regularly. Not all dead infants were carried, however. It's not as if some trigger associated with infant size, weight, or age pushes the mother into an innate response of carrying.

13

  • in birds. Penelope, that Homeric ideal of faithfulness, never cheated on Odysseus during his two-decade absence from home. She pined with loneliness, but stayed true in her body and her heart. Odysseus himself achieved no such spousal fidelity—remember the temptress Circe? We might playfully suggest that Homer, in creating a long-loyal woman and a philandering man, anticipated modern-day pop-psychology stereotypes (the man strays, the woman stays). But despite his adultery, no one thinks to question Odysseus's love for Penelope.
  • While birds like storks, swans, and geese are linked in our minds with monogamy, the symbolic resonance of crows and ravens is more complicated. Corvids are birds of mystery and contradiction. They symbolize, on the one hand, trickery and deceit, death and doom. Yet they stand just as much for creativity, for healing and prophecy, and for the transformative power of death.
  • In Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich suggests that these contrasting themes emerged at different stages of human history. Ravens were revered, he says, when we as a species were hunters. Back then, where ravens flew, landed, and feasted, large animals could be found, animals whose meat sustained our lives as well. Later, when humans settled down and began to herd domesticated animals, the raven's association with death shifted. Now the raven became a thief, a stealer of that sustaining meat.
  • In the Arctic, a pair of ravens cooperated to kill seal pups resting on the ice. One raven would swoop down and land near a pup's ice hole
  • Corvids' social groups are hotbeds of shared learning and communication, where individuals are recognized and problems are solved intelligently. Sometimes it seems the birds gather with the express intent of sharing information with each other.
  • But do corvids really grieve? Marzluff and Angell report a curious thing that sometimes happens with crows: a loud, squawky cluster of birds, numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, gathers and stays together for about a quarter of an hour. Then there's a period of silence, followed by a collective departure. Left behind is a single dead crow.
  • In their more recent book Gifts of the Crow, they devote a chapter to "passion, wrath, and grief" among corvids. There they recount what happened when a golf ball hit a crow on a Seattle golf course. The precision strike was an accident, of course; concerned golfers who witnessed the crow go down were startled to see that another crow immediately came to its aid. This second bird pulled on the first crow's wings, calling out all the while. Five more crows soon arrived. At that point, three crows together "began pecking and pulling on the apparently dead bird, trying to lift it up by the wings." The golfers assumed the bird would not survive and moved on, only to learn two holes later from other players that the stricken crow had in fact revived and flown off.
  • Marzluff and Angell emphasize that crows and ravens "routinely" gather around bodies of their own dead. That response may be adaptive, they think, to the extent that it aids the birds in assessing what killed their dead confederate (thus increasing their chances of avoiding that fate themselves). It may, in addition, help the birds size up their new place in the flocks' shifting hierarchy.

15

  • Jennifer Holland of the National Geographic Society published Unlikely Friendships, and it hit the best-seller lists. Friendships between a sled dog and a polar bear, a snake and a hamster, and forty-five other pairs—including Tarra and Bella—are explored in her book
  • Photographer Norbert Rosing watched as the bear rolled over and stretched out a paw toward that dog. Cautious at first, the dog began to relax, and respond to the bear's play invitation. At one point, the dog cried out in pain when the bear bit hard, but from that point forward the bear checked his strength in deference to his smaller partner. The play bout lasted about twenty minutes, and the bear returned over the next several days to play with the dog.
  • The story of Peaches and Jezebel shows that, even when animals have their own kind around them (unlike Owen and Mzee), they may opt for a cross-species friendship. With other goats available, why did Jezebel seek the company of a horse? Why did Tarra, surrounded by other elephants at the Tennessee sanctuary, desire Bella's canine company? How did these cross-species friendships come to matter so much that the survivor became emotionally involved when the friend was dying (as with Jezebel) or after she had died (as with Tarra)?

16

  • Seeing a friend conform to some trend we find distasteful, we may admonish her to stop following the herd: "Don't be such a lemming. Think for yourself!" Lemming conformity is rooted in the idea that these small rodents plunge en masse from cliffs, each following its predecessor over the edge to its death.
  • There may indeed be no link at all between outright self-injury and suicide: the American Psychiatric Association notes that the unfortunate trend of cutting among adolescent girls, though a form of self-injury, is not a suicidal behavior. In fact, most mental health professionals see people who cut into their flesh with blades or knives as striving to help themselves (though in a dysfunctional and dangerous way that signals a need for help), as the stab of physical hurt temporarily relieves their deeper emotional pain.