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whowillsurvive2012.com - The Mayan Calendar predicts the end of time: 2012. See the trailer for 2012, opening November 13.
79 Comments
- thephysicist, on 09/03/2008, -1/+39Some years back at my old house we had a small pond and for the winter months these two geese (male and female) would come down for a drink everymorning, untill one day the female caught her head in the ice and drowned, we when removed the dead goose upon turning home in the evening, the male kept on making distress sounds (cries), a day later the ice was gone but the male returned alone and to our suprise commited suicide, we dont exactly know how, or why (we possibly thought the water was bad, but this wasnt the case) but it too drowned.
Just sort of proves animals do feel death. - Armor1901, on 09/03/2008, -6/+37After hitting my 2nd deer this ***** WEEK tonight, I have determined that if they ARE aware, they at least don't give a *****.
- TheGuruStud, on 09/03/2008, -0/+31When one of our dogs died, his best friend was extremely depressed for weeks. There was nothing you could do to cheer him up. I don't know if he knew what happened, but he knew his best friend was gone and it apparently hurt.
He did see that we took the sick one away in great pain, so who knows, maybe he did know. Dogs (and animals in general) are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. - jaromdl, on 09/03/2008, -4/+30Uhm... I dislike the title.
We are animals. Maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but still. - Pyrrish, on 09/03/2008, -0/+21delete kiss, insert kick
- PueSi, on 09/03/2008, -0/+21I remember hearing about an elephant that died and the other elephants kept trying to wake it up and stayed with the corpse for some time.
Years later the guys studying that group of elephants played a recording of the dead elephant to the group, and the elephants recognized it and tried looking for their dead friend.
It's so sad. - aralls, on 09/03/2008, -0/+20The plural form of deer is deer, sir.
- kidcodea, on 09/03/2008, -1/+18it will
- thatwasawkward, on 09/03/2008, -2/+17This article is proof that rats are awesome.
"Among naked mole rats, for example, which are elaborately social mammals that spend their entire lives in a system of underground tunnels, a corpse is detected quickly and then dragged, kicked or carried to the communal latrine. And when the latrine is filled, said Paul Sherman of Cornell University, “they seal it off with an earthen plug, presumably for hygienic reasons, and dig a new one.”" - paulmer2003, on 09/03/2008, -4/+19You've hit two deers in a week? It seems like you sir, are the one who is unaware.
- veijeri, on 09/03/2008, -0/+14I had a cat "mourn" the death of another neighborhood cat. Poor thing was struck by a car and left for dead, my cat sat at the spot and made some of the saddest, dread-inspiring howls I'd ever heard for days on end every night instead of going on its normal prowl.
Animals are certainly aware to a degree, varying on their social structure/dependency I suppose. - inactive, on 09/03/2008, -7/+20death can kiss my ass
- bratterscain, on 09/03/2008, -2/+15Obvious. Yes they grieve. If a member was valuable to them and they are gone, they go through some stress because things will change for them. It's common and not just a human feeling. A slight change in the way things are done can bring stress upon anyone, human or other animal. It's documented and obvious. Geez, it's 2008. Have we learned yet that "feelings" are chemical reactions induced in the brain from worry, excitement, etc and there's nothing magical or specifically human about them?
- Pyrrish, on 09/03/2008, -10/+20Too bad animals don't go to heaven. For the Bible tells me so. Jokes on them.
- D3koy, on 09/03/2008, -4/+12Uhh, I think you may be on the wrong site, it doesn't require an account... But here you go anyway...
As anybody who has grieved inconsolably over the death of a loved one can attest, extended mourning is, in part, a perverse kind of optimism. Surely this bottomless, unwavering sorrow will amount to something, goes the tape loop. Surely if I keep it up long enough I’ll accomplish my goal, and the person will stop being dead.
Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.
Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did — by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away. “The only time I was ever mobbed by langurs was when I tried to inspect a baby corpse,” said the primatologist Sarah Hrdy. Only gradually will she allow the distance between herself and the ever-gnarlier carcass to grow.
Yes, we’re a lot like other primates, particularly the great apes, with whom we have more than 98 percent of our genes in common. Yet elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief like Gana’s may reveal less about our shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist. Dr. Hrdy, author of “Mother Nature” and the coming “Mothers and Others,” said it made adaptive sense for a primate mother to hang onto her motionless baby and keep her hopes high for a while. “If the baby wasn’t dead, but temporarily comatose, because it was sick or fallen from the tree, well, it might come back to life,” Dr. Hrdy said. “We’re talking about primates who have singleton births after long periods of gestation. Each baby represents an enormous investment for the mother.”
Everywhere in nature, biologists say, are examples of animals behaving as though they were at least vaguely aware of death’s brutal supremacy and yet unpersuaded that it had anything to do with them. Michael Wilson, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota who has studied chimpanzees at Jane Goodall’s research site in Gombe, said chimps were “very different from us in terms of what they understand about death and the difference between the living and the dead.” The Hallmark hanky moment alternates with the Roald Dahl macabre. A mother will try to nurse her dead baby back to life, Dr. Wilson said, “but when the infant becomes quite decayed, she’ll carry it by just one leg or sling it over her back in a casual way.”
Juvenile chimpanzees display signs of genuine grief when their mothers die. In one famous case in Gombe, when a matriarch of the troop named Flo died at the age of 50-plus years, her son, Flint, proved inconsolable. Flint was 8 years old and could easily have cared for himself, but he had been unusually attached to his mother and refused to leave her corpse’s side. Within a month, the son, too, died.
Yet adult chimpanzees rarely react with overt sentimentality to the death of another adult, Dr. Wilson said. As a rule, sick or elderly adults go off into the forest to die alone, he said, and those that die in company often do so at the hands of other adults, who “sometimes make sure the victim is dead, and sometimes they don’t,” he said. The same laissez-faire attitude toward death-versus-life applies to chimpanzee hunting behavior. “When they’re hunting red colobus monkeys, they will either kill the monkeys first or simply immobilize them and start eating them while they’re still alive,” Dr. Wilson said. “The monkey will continue screaming and thrashing as they pull its guts out, which is very unpleasant for humans who are watching.”
For some animals, the death of a conspecific is a little tinkle of the dinner bell. A lion will approach another lion’s corpse, give it a sniff and a lick, and if the corpse is fresh enough, will start to eat it. For others, a corpse is considered dangerous and must be properly disposed of. Among naked mole rats, for example, which are elaborately social mammals that spend their entire lives in a system of underground tunnels, a corpse is detected quickly and then dragged, kicked or carried to the communal latrine. And when the latrine is filled, said Paul Sherman of Cornell University, “they seal it off with an earthen plug, presumably for hygienic reasons, and dig a new one.”
Among the social insects, the need for prompt corpse management is considered so pressing that there are dedicated undertakers, workers that within a few minutes of a death will pick up the body and hoist or fly it outside, to a safe distance from hive or nest, the better to protect against possible contagious disease. Honeybees are such compulsive housekeepers that if a mouse or other large creature, drawn by the warmth or promise of honey, happens to make its way into the hive and die inside, the bees, unable to bodily remove it, will embalm it in resin collected from trees. “You can find mummified mice inside beehives that are completely preserved right down to their whiskers,” said Gene E. Robinson, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
But all is not grim for those dead in tooth and claw. Researchers have determined that elephants deserve their longstanding reputation as exceptionally death-savvy beings, their concern for the remains of their fellows approaching what we might call reverence. Reporting in the journal Biology Letters, Karen McComb of the University of Sussex and her colleagues found that when African elephants were presented with an array of bones and other natural objects, the elephants spent considerably more time exploring the skulls and tusks of elephants than they did anything else, including the skulls of rhinoceroses and other large mammals.
George Wittemyer of Colorado State University and his colleagues described in Applied Animal Behavior Science the extraordinary reactions of different elephants to the death of one of their prominent matriarchs. “One female stood over the body, rocking back and forth,” Dr. Wittemyer said in an interview. “Others raised their foot over her head. Others touched their tusks to hers. They would do their behaviors, and then leave.”
They were saying goodbye, or maybe, Won’t you please come back home? - kd420, on 09/03/2008, -3/+11Other animals probably deal with death similarly, but some humans actually take it to the level of believing in invisible, all powerful beings. That's how scared of death they are, can you imagine!! Having to believe someone's watching over you, waiting to greet you when you die.
- Dominicc2003, on 09/03/2008, -1/+9That's what I used as an argument against God/heaven once:
How can you be in complete bliss in heaven, KNOWING that the pet you loved will never live again?
The only way would be if you were made ignorant of that fact and then heaven would just consist of being happy due to ignorance, not true happiness. - Pake, on 09/03/2008, -1/+8Well, if you knew sooner or later some guy would try to shoot you, wouldn't you at least try to off yourself in the most inconvenient way possible for man?
- Zarokima, on 09/03/2008, -0/+6Or waiting to send you into a lake of fire to burn in agony forever and ever.
- nemrel, on 09/03/2008, -0/+6RTA and find out!
- nemrel, on 09/03/2008, -0/+6Wow - very interesting story. Thanks for sharing.
- nemrel, on 09/03/2008, -0/+6And more sensitive to the emotions and other subtle signals that we do when we grieve. We had a cat pass away about a year ago and we ended up getting a new cat because everyone in the house felt the loss. But I wonder if - with domesticated animals - they pick up on the subtle signals we are sending out when another pet passes. I know that when my wife and I fight or have heavy discussions our cats MUST come over to us to bring some joy and happiness to the moment. Sometimes we end our fights because of their concern for us and our sadness.
- troy1of2, on 09/03/2008, -2/+7http://www.subtire.com/i.php?n=dgh.jpg
- Zarokima, on 09/03/2008, -0/+5Wow, that's so wrong. It's like coming up behind a kid with a recording of their dead mother.
- o0joshua0o, on 09/03/2008, -0/+5Humans don't really believe in their own deaths. We live in a constant state of subconscious denial.
- inactive, on 09/03/2008, -0/+5These are naked mole rats. Besides being ugly as hell, they are hardly related to the common lab rat or pest you might see in urban areas. Their social behaviors are largely unique in mammals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Mole_Rat - SeaFour, on 09/03/2008, -0/+5Maybe you should slow down before you make it three deer in a week.
- Esstee, on 09/03/2008, -0/+4Right, well tell that to the dog that attacked and mutilated the next door neighbors daughter.
We'll see that bastard in court! - Zarokima, on 09/03/2008, -0/+4Adblock. The rest of us have had it for quite a while now.
- Nirgaul, on 09/03/2008, -0/+4As a species, we are becoming more acutely aware of the capacity of mammals in general to experience emotions of many forms, most poignantly, the pain of loss. We should strive to treat them with all the kindness due a dear friend.
- jamesmudgett, on 09/03/2008, -0/+4I had a chicken that my father made a small coup for. My neighbor also later got a duckling. After some time we released both to play in our back yards that were not separated by a fence of any kind, so they roam free. The duck and chicken soon became friends and would wobble around together. After some time of being friends the chicken of mine was squished by my neighbors mini-van. The duck was noticeably upset by the loss of a friend.
IMHO, all animals feel this loss of life in one way or another. If you've ever watched any of the BBC Planet Earth series you will pick this up quickly, Animals have a strong will to live, and that is why they fight for it. - LeggoMyEgo, on 09/03/2008, -0/+3just delete your cookies, nytimes randomly brings up that login screen, you dont have to do it.
- beatleman, on 09/03/2008, -0/+3I think geese have some bond with their mate that's stronger than other animals. One of the saddest things I've seen was a goose that had been run over by a car in the middle of the street and another one (I assume its mate) was standing there in the middle of the street next to it and wouldn't budge.
- getoffmybridge, on 05/05/2009, -0/+3use bugmenot
- FuzzyCat, on 09/03/2008, -1/+4
Lemmings running over the edge of cliffs is a myth put out by Disney. - cair0, on 09/03/2008, -0/+3it depends on how you define "unaware"
animals in some sense are always "aware" of what keeps them alive and what doesn't, thanks to millennia of natural selection. - Zarokima, on 09/03/2008, -1/+4Yes, you're still lacking it. We know. Just give up on anyone actually liking you and find a hooker already.
- FreeTalkLIve, on 09/03/2008, -0/+2This is so true.
- Intercon, on 09/03/2008, -0/+2Whatever. This ongoing debate for "Intelligent Design," might gain a little traction if the retards spouting about it used science in their arguments, instead of some 1600 year old book written by Greek scholars, and based on the mythology of primitive desert peoples.
To stand before the awe-inspiring beauty in the complexity of life, and to be moved to believe in a creative force, a source for life, and even an "intelligence beyond our own" is completely understandable and many scientists have similar reactions. To attribute that magnificence to these ancient, primitive, fairytale interpretations of reality is the point where I get off the bus. - Zuljin, on 09/03/2008, -5/+7Jesus, learn to drive!
- twst1up, on 09/03/2008, -2/+4of course they're aware of it...but how do they DEAL with it man?
- TheGuruStud, on 09/03/2008, -2/+4KAMIKAZE!
- troye, on 09/04/2008, -0/+2Thanks for the protip.
- inactive, on 09/03/2008, -4/+6I'm thinking you forgot the /sarcasm at the end of your post.
- jmanfivek, on 09/03/2008, -0/+2Consciousness is a spectrum. I don't think you're educated enough to be able to draw the line as to what is constituted as cognizant or not. In fact, I'd ask you a simple question which requires no education: how would you test for consciousness?
- Adamlite, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1Chimpanzees are awesome for eating living, screaming, disemboweled monkeys and not giving a ***** about it.
- CosmicJustice, on 09/03/2008, -2/+3And some humans are so unsure of their convictions that they need constant reinforcement from strangers on a social networking site. Their insecurity often becomes so intense that they need to inject it into every discussion.
- Intercon, on 10/11/2008, -0/+1You miss my point. I am not a "post-modernist." I support and engage in science. And I'm not putting forth a "feel-good monologue." I'm certainly not threatened by the idea that humans and animals have instincts and reflexes that make up the larger part of our behavior. What bothers me, is the tendency of non-scientists with science education to think of our world as a clockwork orange, and to mistake the description, for the thing itself. A botanist can tell me all about how the Krebs cycle creates energy from sunlight in a tree's leaves, and the stages it goes through in growing from an acorn into an oak. But he or she can't create a tree, or even tell me why a tree exists in the first place. I'm not saying that some omniscient super-being created the world in 6 days, either.
My point would be this: While it should be obvious that religion needs to bring scientific knowledge into its scope, so that humans may learn and evolve spiritually in the real world, at the same time, scientific descriptions, as rigorous as they may be, can have the effect of making humans arrogant in regards to the other living things on this planet, by engendering a clinical air with regards to plants and animals as a living symbiotic system.
And this article exemplified that to me, with Dr. Hardy's arrogant statement that it makes "adaptive sense" for the mother to hold on to her baby for awhile, in the thought that it might "recover." as if the ape is too stupid to know the difference between a sick baby, and a dead one. It puts animals into a lower category, by explaining away grief, as an evolutionary mechanism.
What seems to be the real threat, is the idea of animals having the potential for emotions that we consider to be too complex for anyone other than our own specie. If that were true, we might have to rethink our own behavior with regards not only to our current livestock practices, but also to habitat destruction, the decline of biological diversity, and our stewardship of the environment. - Intercon, on 09/03/2008, -0/+1What the hell is wrong with humanity that it has become so removed from the lifecycles of animals and plants, out of touch with the greater mystery of life, and out of sync with the turning of the seasons and the natural world?
You know you're right be cause you have a zoologist friend!? Do you understand how assinine that sounds?
Most higher animals have the capacity for affinity and some would argue, love. If that's possible, then obviously death will affect them. To arrogantly assume that animals show emotion in ways that seem "noble" or "decorous" to humans is completely missing the point.
Animals deal with death everyday, from killing other animals to eat them, to having members of their social group succumbing to predators. Please free your mind from this horrible 20th century Western mentality that the natural world behaves in some robotic, clinical manner. It is antithetical to common sense, and hinders humanity's ability to responsibly interact with our ecosystems and ALL their inhabitants.
Science is a description, an accurately observed and meticulous collection of descriptions of the world in which we find ourselves. Don't make the mistake of confusing the description with the mysterious and beautiful world that engendered it. -
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