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COMMON KNOWLEDGE: Do animals understand what it means to die?

There have been some philosophers who argue that the concept of death is necessary in order for death to be bad for you. As long as an animal’s life is painless, killing them is no harm since they don’t know what death means. This would have important implications for how we treat animals, because it would imply that it is morally permissible to kill them for food, unless it were wrong for some reason other than being bad for the animals. We shouldn’t wait until the concept of death is proven to try to treat animals in ethical ways. We should prevent the infliction of unnecessary pain and suffering regardless of them having a concept of death or not.

SHAYLA LOVE: We know that animals often behave in particular ways toward dead members of their own species. Ravens and crows gather and make loud calling noises. Chimpanzees in the Taï Forest in Africa have been seen covering dead bodies with leafy branches. In 2015, when a wild female chimpanzee died, the male she had been in a relationship with for three and a half years prevented young individuals from approaching her while he “performed several close-contact and caretaking behaviors.” Some primate mothers carry the body of their dead infant for days or weeks, or eat parts of the mummified corpse. Elephants have been seen gathering around, interacting with, or carrying the bodies of their babies. Dolphins sometimes keep dead bodies afloat, and in 2011 a beluga whale mother carried her dead calf for around a week.

A field called comparative thanatology documents these practices, and compares how different species interact with death and the dying. Hanging over this research are more philosophical questions: What do these behaviors really mean? Are animals acting in instinctive, hormonal, and unaware ways? Or, when they interact with their dead, do they have some level of understanding of the concept of death?

When interpreting animal behavior, there’s always the risk of anthropomorphism, or projecting human-like emotions and thoughts onto nonhuman animals. But there could still be ways to probe whether animals have a concept of death with philosophy’s help, by defining what a concept of death is at a bare minimum, and combining observations of animals in the wild with experiments in the lab.

Learning whether animals can grasp such concepts will help us to better understand their minds, and it could have important implications for the ways we treat them. But grappling with the concept of death is a trait long considered to belong to humans alone. Showing that animals can grasp it too—even on a smaller scale—would mean we’re not alone in engaging with our mortality…

Ben Bradley, a philosopher at Syracuse University, said there have been some philosophers who argue that the concept of death is necessary in order for death to be bad for you. As long as an animal’s life is painless, killing them is no harm since they don’t know what death means.

“If you can’t conceptualize something, then you can’t care about it, and so it can’t be bad for you,” he explained. “If this is right, then if animals don’t have a concept of death, their deaths aren’t bad for them. This would have important implications for how we treat animals, because it would imply that it is morally permissible to kill them for food, unless it were wrong for some reason other than being bad for the animals”…

Bradley thinks we should reject the claim that nothing can be bad for you unless you care about it… we shouldn’t wait until the concept of death is proven to try to treat animals in ethical ways. “We should prevent the infliction of unnecessary pain and suffering regardless of them having a concept of death or not… On a larger level,… this work, and question, as continuing to chip away at the idea of human cognitive superiority over animals in all domains. “Whenever we can prove that there is continuity in a particular aspect of our mental lives in the mental lives of other animals, it undermines any claims of human superiority that we use to justify our boundless exploitation of nature”. SOURCE…

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