Do Animals Have a Concept of Death?

On March 2^nd, Spanish philosopher Susana Monsó gave a fascinating talk at the Vetmeduni about her book “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” whose German translation “Das Schweigen der Schimpansen: Wie Tiere den Tod verstehen” was recently awarded Austria's 2026 “Science Book of the Year” in the category of science/technology by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Women, Science and Research.[1] Drawing on the fields of comparative thanatology and the philosophy of mind, Susana asks whether nonhuman animals can have a concept of death and shows which mistakes and biases one should avoid in thinking about these matters.

Comparative thanatology is an interdisciplinary field of study focused on how non-human animals perceive, respond to, and interact with death and dying. Much of the scholarly literature in comparative thanatology deals with anecdotes of animals that respond to death with behaviours resembling human grief. An example is the story of orca whale Tahlequah who carried the corpse of her calf for more than two weeks, over a distance of more than 1,000 miles, across the ocean.

Susana argues we need to be mindful of anthropomorphization when we try to make sense of such behaviour. Anthropomorphism is the unjustified attribution of typically human traits or characteristics to animals. When it comes to death, the fact that an animal’s behaviour resembles human mourning is not sufficient evidence to infer that it is mourning.

Anthropomorphism is not the only challenge in determining whether non-human animals understand death. In this post I am going to focus on three other pernicious biases Susana discussed in her book and in her presentation, namely anthropectomy, intellectual anthropocentrism and emotional anthropocentricsm.

Intellectual Anthropocentrism and Anthropectomy

Comparative thanatology tends to be intellectually anthropocentric because it uses human concepts of death as its baseline, Susana points out. This renders the conditions for an understanding of death very demanding because they are linked to capacities like a theory of mind and conceptualizations of life, absence, and time. If the bar is set so high then the question of whether nonhuman animals can have a concept of death will be, according to Susana, an unequivocal “no”. This points to another problem in comparative thanatology, anthropectomy: the erroneous denial of typically human characteristics in animals. But just because animals might not share our human concept of death does not imply that they lack an understanding of it. A concept of death might not be a matter of all-or-nothing, Susana thinks. It is for this reason that she asks whether animals can have anything that counts as a concept of death. 

Susana identifies non-functionality and irreversibility as the essential subcomponents of what she calls a “minimal concept of death”. Basically, the latter amounts to understanding that something can permanently stop functioning. Certain cognitive capacities are required for this, such as the ability to distinguish biological from nonbiological movement and the ability to develop expectations about the typical behaviours of other animals. These capacities are very widespread in the animal kingdom, and there are many paths by which animals in the wild can come to an understanding of non-functionality and irreversibility, Susana argues. Therefore, a concept of death can be expected to be relatively prevalent.

Emotional Anthropocentrism

Intellectual anthropocentrism is not the only challenge in comparative thanatology, as Susana argues. Emotional anthropocentrism also poses a risk. Here, an animal’s relation to death becomes salient only when it is human-like. This, in turn, can lead us to misinterpret animals’ responses to death that are unlike our own. One example Susana gives is the so-called play parenting behaviour of chimpanzees who have been observed engaging in maternal-like behaviour toward dead baby chimps. Although one might think that they don’t understand that their baby is dead, the opposite might be the case. After all, women with a stillbirth are sometimes encouraged to act as if their baby was alive precisely to help them cope. Another example are anecdotes about dogs who have eaten the faces of their deceased owners. Rather than a lack of love for their owner, as is sometimes suspected, such behaviour could very well be an expression of grief, even if it looks alien to us. Anxious dogs often nibble to self-soothe, which could lead to chewing and swallowing. “One thing simply leads to the other”, Susana reasons.

Susana makes a convincing case that Homo sapiens might not be the only species with an understanding of death. She reminds us, as scholars, to be mindful of the ways in which anthropocentricism and other biases operate in our work and to be careful of the ways in which they influence the types of questions we ask and the conclusions we draw. While nonhuman animals’ way of relating to death may not always resemble ours, this does not automatically translate to them lacking a concept of death. This understanding opens comparative thanatology to a whole host of new questions, methodologies, and theories that are interesting and will hopefully give deeper insights into the ways in which nonhuman animals experience and relate to each other and to death.

[1] Susana wrote it during her time at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, funded by a FWF Research Grant. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science of UNED, Madrid.