Do animals know when other animals are dying?

For many weeks, news of a mother orca carrying her dead infant through the icy waters of the Salish Sea captured the attention of many around the world. Keeping the infant afloat as best she could, the orca, named Tahlequah, also known as J35 by scientists, persisted for 17 days, before finally dropping the dead calf.

This has been one of the most protracted displays of marine mammal grieving.

Among scientists, however, there remains a prejudice against the idea that animals feel “real” grief or respond in complex ways to death. Following reports of the “grieving,” zoologist Jules Howard, for example, wrote, “If you believe J35 was displaying evidence of mourning or grief, you are making a case that rests on faith, not on scientific endeavor.”

As a bioethicist, I’ve been studying the interplay between science and ethics for more than two decades. A growing body of scientific evidence supports the idea that nonhuman animals are aware of death, can experience grief and will sometimes mourn for or ritualize their dead.

You can’t see when you don’t look

Animal grief skeptics are correct about one thing: Scientists don’t know all that much about death-related behaviors such as grief in nonhuman animals. Only a few scholars have explored how the multitude of creatures with whom humans share the planet think and feel about death, either their own or others’.

But, I argue, that they don’t know because they haven’t looked.

Scientists haven’t yet turned serious attention to the study of what might be called “comparative thanatology” – the study of death and the practices associated with it. This is perhaps because most humans failed to even entertain the possibility that animals might care about the death of those they love.

Awareness of mortality has remained, for many scientists and philosophers alike, a bastion of human-perceived uniqueness.

Animal grief

Nevertheless, a growing collection of anecdotal reports of grieving and other death-related behaviors in a wide range of species is helping researchers frame questions about death awareness in animals and figure out how best to study these behaviors.

Elephants, for example, are known to take a great interest in the bones of their deceased and to mourn for dead relatives. One of these vivid ritual explorations of bones was caught on video in 2016 by a doctoral student studying elephants in Africa. Members of three different elephant families came to visit the body of a deceased matriarch, smelling and touching and repeatedly passing by the corpse.

Chimpanzees have also been repeatedly observed engaging in death-related behaviors. In one case, a small group of captive chimpanzees was carefully observed after one of their members, an elderly female named Pansy, died. The chimpanzees checked Pansy’s body for signs of life and cleaned bits of straw from her fur. They refused to go to the place where Pansy had died for several days afterwards.

In another instance, scientists documented a chimpanzee using a tool to clean a corpse. In 2017, a team of primate researchers in Zambia filmed a mother using a piece of dried grass to clean debris from the teeth of her deceased son. The implication, according to the scientists involved, is that chimpanzees continue to feel social bonds, even after death, and feel some sensitivity toward dead bodies.

Magpies have been observed burying their dead under twigs of grass. Ethologist Marc Bekoff, who observed this behavior, described it as a “magpie funeral.”

In one of the most fascinating recent examples, an 8-year-old boy caught video footage of peccaries, a species of wild pig-like animal found in parts of the U.S., responding to a dead herd-mate. The peccaries visited the dead body repeatedly, nuzzling it and biting at it, as well as sleeping next to it.

Crows have been seen forming what scientists call “cacophonous aggregations” – mobbing and squawking in a big group – in response to another dead crow.

These are just a few of the many examples. (For a couple of additional videos, click here and here.)

Some scientists insist that behaviors such of these shouldn’t be labeled with human terms such as “grief” and “mourning” because it isn’t rigorous science. Science can observe a given behavior, but it is very difficult to know what feeling has motivated that behavior. A 2011 study published in Science that found evidence of empathy in rats and mice was met with a similar kind of skepticism.

It’s about how animals grieve

I agree that a large degree of caution is appropriate when it comes to ascribing emotions and behaviors such as grief to animals. But not because there is any doubt that animals feel or grieve, or that a mother’s anguish over the loss of her child is any less painful.

The case of Tahlequah shows that humans have a great deal to learn about other animals. The question is not “Do animals grieve?” but “How do animals grieve?”

Jessica Pierce, Professor of Bioethics, University of Colorado Denver

Trigger Image/Alamy

Do any animals, other than us, have an awareness of their own mortality?

Gerry Cannon, via Facebook

Why else would they flee from a predator?

Chris Bailey, via Facebook

They instinctively avoid threats because of learned and passed-on behaviour, but have no conception of mortality.

@gws_al, via Twitter

All animals have an innate sense of mortality. Fight or flight, they all want to live another day.

Whether they are actually aware why, I can’t answer.

@ariyanmalik409, via Twitter

For any living system to be aware of complex thoughts such as their own mortality, they must exhibit a level of conscious complexity that allows for awareness of such thoughts.

Susana MonsÓ

National Distance Education University, Madrid, Spain

What does it mean to have an awareness of one’s own mortality?

We could take it to mean understanding that you will inevitably die, that this is an unavoidable consequence of being alive. Understood like this, it is unlikely that non-linguistic animals can be aware of their mortality, because the notion of the inevitability of death seems to require knowledge accumulated and passed down through generations.

None of us has direct proof that everyone dies. We only know this because we have been told. Without language, it is difficult to see how this idea could be reached.

There is, however, a second, less-demanding sense in which, say, a monkey might have an awareness of its own mortality. This is the notion, not that it will die, but that it can die. That is, the idea that this is something that could happen to it, but not inevitably so. The notion of potential mortality could in principle fall within the reach of non-linguistic animals, because it can be acquired solely on the basis of personal experiences.

How might our monkey reach this notion? It is implausible that it would spontaneously conclude anything about its own potential mortality; instead, an animal could only come to grasp this idea by first understanding something about the mortality of others. For instance, it might gather that sometimes its fellow creatures stop moving and doing the things they usually do, in a way that is different from when they fall asleep. It may come to associate this change of state with certain preceding events, such as falling from a tree or encountering a leopard, to the extent that it comes to expect that result when one of its kin falls from a tree or encounters a leopard.

With enough of these experiences, coupled with a degree of self-awareness, the monkey may start to comprehend that the same thing could happen to it, if it were involved in those events. This might not engender existential angst, because the monkey could feel safe so long as it stays away from big cats and takes care when sitting on branches, but it still implies some understanding of death.

@carlmateta, via Twitter

Where I live, if you slaughter a cow, other cattle bellow at the sight and sometimes resist moving away.

@HeXiang125, via Twitter

You are asking the wrong animals this question.

To answer this question – or ask a new one – email .

Questions should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address.

New Scientist Ltd retains total editorial control over the published content and reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format.

Terms and conditions apply.