Do animals understand death

When the Virginia opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralysed, her body temperature drops, her breathing and heart rate are reduced to a minimum, her tongue turns blue, and her glands simulate the smell of rot. Despite her convincing corpse disguise, the opossum is paying close attention to her surroundings, ready to swing back into action as soon as the coast is clear. Not unlike the cat in Schrödinger’s famous paradox, the opossum is dead and alive at the same time. In this talk, I will argue that the opossum has a lot to teach us about other species’ concept of death. I will also explore what we can learn about animals’ perception of mortality from ants who attend their own ‘funeral’, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of corpses, dogs who snack on their caretakers, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Throughout history, human beings have thought of themselves as the only animals with a notion of mortality. In this talk, I will argue that this view is a result of our anthropocentric biases and that philosophical reflection on the latest evidence from comparative thanatology can shed light on the notion that, far from being uniquely human, the concept of death is likely widespread in nature.