Few thing have earn as much as thought and attention in the collective human mind as dying . For as long as we ’ve had the capacity to express ourselves through words and other material body of communicating , the subject of death and dying has loomedever present . But Susana Monsó , a Spain - based philosopher , contend that while humanity ’s special flavor of fascination and apprehensiveness at the notion of expiry may be unique , our sensing of it actually is n’t .
Her book , Playing Possum : How Animals Understand Death , was first published in Spanish in 2021 but has now received an update and a revise English translation that will be outlater next calendar month . In the book , Monsó discusses the emerging field of science that seeks to understand how animals view and oppose to death . And she makes the hard slip that humans are far from the only creature to know the substance of die , even if our vocabulary take issue . Gizmodo mouth to Monsó about the origins of her book , the “ romanticist and killjoy ” of creature knowledge research , and why the possum ’s ability to play dead reveals so much about how other animals grok the nature of death rate . The following conversation has been edit and condensed for clearness .
Gizmodo : In your career as a philosopher , you ’ve largely focused on discussing and well understanding the brain of nonhuman animal . But what specifically made you want to write a pop science book about how other animals see the construct of expiry ?
A possum playing dead.© EyeEm Mobile GmbH via Getty
Monsó’:So academically speak , I started work on this at a prison term where I was doing a postdoc and I needed a fresh topic that was completely unlike from my doctorial dissertation to apply for a project . And I thought of this subject because there had been a series of reports documenting animals ’ reactions to the utter and the dying . I ’m always sort of supervise the previous research in comparative cognition , and this had really catch my eye as a Modern emerging discipline that was in pauperism of some philosophical depth psychology of central concepts , some clearing of the nucleus ideas at stake here . And it ’s tie into my general interest , which has always been in those capability that we think of as uniquely human , and that we be given to use to ground this idea of human exceptionalism — this sense of moral superiority that then allows us to exploit the natural world without really thinking about other organism .
But at the same sentence , I was about to twist 30 , and I think it fall out to a batch of hoi polloi that when they approach that years they set off to mean a batch about death . I ’ve heard this from several other people , and I suppose it has to do with with something about going into prescribed adulthood , so to speak . So I became kind of obsessed with decease in that time in my spirit . And at the time , I really did n’t connect the two things in my head . I conceive that my inquiry was totally separated from this , but with time and distance , I gain that I also may have unconsciously turned to this subject because I needed answer myself . I needed to find a fashion of cop with my own existential fears .
Gizmodo : You point out that scientist and philosophers have only latterly started to severely analyze how animals respond to death , a field known ascomparative thanatology . Why has it get hold of people , and particularly expert in cognition , so long to see brute as subject of translate it ?
Monsó : Comparative cognition in ecumenical is really wary of the dangers of anthropomorphism and anthropomorphizing creature . Many years ago , before the cognitive revolution , psychologists were n’t even talking about the mental United States Department of State of creature . They were just describing their demeanor . And even though behaviorism is supposed to be a matter of the past , I think it still has some presence today , or at least some of its underlying assumptions are present in fields like present-day 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 matter that could lead us to engage in anthropomorphism . That ’s my supposition . And this means there are several topics that it ’s submit a while for scientist to take seriously , even nowadays .
Daniel Dennett [ a well - respect philosopher and cognitive scientist whopassed at the age of 82this April ] made this note between theromantics and the killjoy . And you could still see some scientists who are uncoerced to talk in human footing about animals , are willing to tattle about things like friendly relationship and morality using these variety of discussion , whereas others still want to utilize words that set us apart from animals , words like association instead of friendship , or prosocial behavior or else of ethics . And I interpret why they are doing it , and I think the reasons are authoritative . But I also think that there ’s nothing wrong with asking certain questions , such as : Do animals realize end ? So long as we study them very cautiously and in a way that ’s that ’s very mindful of the fact that we could engage in theanthropism .
Gizmodo : Something that I really find interesting , not just in your book , but in reading the interviews and the reactions others have had so far , is that people will oftentalk about your bookor about how animals see death through the lens of grief or bereavement , framing it in the ways people be given to react to death . But you sample to expand our understanding of death beyond that . Why is it authoritative to perhaps disconnect ourselves from that human linear perspective ?
Monsó : We do need to strike a residue between daring to call for these questions , but also being mindful of the fact that we are talking about other species with other ecologies , other social construction , other sensory capacities . They have different body and dissimilar way of interacting with the world , of interact with each other , of doing all sorts of things that they have to do for natural selection . So even if they have an understanding of death , they ’re not going to have the same understanding that we do inevitably . And if they react emotionally to death , it ’s not going to be of necessity like our own chemical reaction .
And I think the topic of grief , it ’s so entangled with the whimsy of understanding death that so many people have a lot of difficulties separating these two thought — the mind of realise destruction and the idea of grieving . But they are very different mind . you may understand that someone has died without aggrieve that person . And in fact , we do that all the fourth dimension . We hear about famous people break down , and we do n’t grieve their death , because we do n’t have a attachment with them . And for animals in the wild , they have a lot of experience with expiry , and a lot of the deaths that they are locomote to see are not start to be deaths of individuals that they care about , so it ’s very unconvincing that they ’re going to aggrieve them . But this does n’t mean that they do n’t understand what ’s start on .
Another thing is that end is very often a gain for a lot of animals . For predators , for instance , death is not a loss . it ’s a profit . It think of that they ’re perish to have a full stomach that dark . So , I think it ’s very important to ramify these two musical theme .
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Gizmodo : You talk about piles of brute throughout the book , but it ’s not until the destruction that you actually talk over the critter in your claim , the humblepossum [ In North America , “ possum ” iscolloquially usedto refer to the Virginia phalanger ( Didelphis virginiana ) , though a related to but distinct group of pouched mammal found in Australia are also often called possums as well].Why are these pouched mammal in particular an of import illustration of how expiry might be wide figure throughout the animal realm ?
Monsó : fundamentally , in my Holy Scripture , I ’m trying to fence that the concept of destruction is promiscuous to produce than we unremarkably presuppose , and then we can expect it to be moderately far-flung in nature . And the possum provide one of the best spell of evidence that we have of this , and that ’s because she engages in a very elaborate death display whenever she feels threaten . She goes into what ’s call thanatosis — this demise assume where she incorporates all form of signals of death . She adopts the bodily and facial expression of a corpse . Her dead body temperature drops . Her breathing and ticker pace are reduced . She secrete this putrid smelling liquid , and she give up responding to the world . And if you did n’t get laid in feeler about her lilliputian deception , you would be fooled by it for certain . Now , the phalanger does n’t of necessity understand what she ’s doing . For her , this reaction is likely correspondent to when we are in a Department of State of fright and our pupil expand , or our hair stands on end , and we ’re not control this . We ’re not even aware of this , but it happen automatically . For the possum , it ’s probably something like that . It ’s believably also an robotic process . However , we need to have a reason why this defense mechanism evolved and why it has the anatomy that it has .
So a good manner of cogitate about this is by thinking , for instance , of the example of peacocks and their tail . Biologists often say that by calculate at the peacock ’s tail , we can get a coup d’oeil of what the peahen finds sexy , proper ? Because the peacock butterfly ’s tail is obviously a huge disadvantage in a slew of country , but it ’s very advantageous , because the peahen finds it sexy , so it makes it more likely for the peacock butterfly to procreate . So by see at the peacock ’s tail , we can have a windowpane into the mind of the peahen .
The opossum ’s death display is standardized in that it provide a window into the judgement of her vulture . There are several reasons why a predator might not want to exhaust an animal that ’s already dead , or might favour to store it for later consumption , and this can give the possum a chance to escape . But for this to mould , she needs to put on a convincing end video display . So the opossum is a good art object of evidence that there are vulture in the world with a concept of decease , whose cognition has acted as a option atmospheric pressure and has ease up shape to the opossum ’s display over many generation — because the more elaborate the show , the more convincing it was , the less potential it would be that she would get eaten , and so the more potential it would be that she would reproduce .
And the opossum is not the only beast who does this . There are other animals with very elaborate death displays , but they ’re quite disjoined from each other in the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree of life-time , which suggests that these selection pressure are quite widespread , that they exist among different predators and different habitat . And so this , too , point to the construct of death being actually pretty widespread in nature .
Gizmodo : Your playscript provide a mickle of really fascinating lessons and reminders about decease and how it ’s seen in the Earth . But what do you hope readers most take forth from reading it ?
Monsó : So my promise is that the Word of God will reach readers who are scientifically curious , but not particularly into animate being . Because I ’m hoping that my ledger will serve generate some awe for the lifelike world in these people , and maybe a will to pay more aid to animals and to discover how fascinating they are in their diverseness , and in the many agency in which they dwell in the humankind . The masses who love animals and who record my book , they ’re already on my side , so to speak . But it ’s my Bob Hope to give these other the great unwashed and to breathe in in them this sensation of regard for the natural world that I think is an inevitable moment of simply paying attending to it and see how terrific and amazing it really is .
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