Do Animals Grieve

Tahlequah, an orca, gave birth in 2018. Her daughter, on the other hand, died within an hour. Tahlequah, on the other hand, remained in her body. And she maintained it afloat atop her own for the following 17 days and 1,600 kilometers, diving to rescue the body whenever it slipped away, even after it began to deteriorate. Tahlequah's conduct was obviously unique, since she changed her feeding and travel patterns. But was she in mourning—or just perplexed? Do nonhuman creatures cry? This is a difficult question.

Charles Darwin proposed in 1871 that other animals experience a wide spectrum of emotions, including mourning. However, many scientists have long been leery of projecting human emotions onto other creatures, especially in the absence of a reliable bridge between our minds and theirs. It's also possible that they exhibit erratic behavior after death for other adaptive reasons. For a time, the assumption was that humans were unique: other animals were reacting and surviving, while we were thinking and experiencing.

Throughout the twentieth century, this notion was increasingly questioned. In 1985, for example, a gorilla named Koko, who had been taught to use certain American Sign Language signs, was informed that her kitten companion had died. She made distress sounds and, after gazing at a photo of another kitten, signed "cry," "sad," and "frown." There is now a growing body of evidence and observations indicating that some animals, including mammals and birds, may experience grief. Eleanor, an elephant matriarch, died in 2003. Within minutes, another matriarch named Grace approached and assisted Eleanor in standing, only for her to collapse again. Grace spoke up, stayed by Eleanor's side, and attempted to push her back up. When Eleanor died, a woman named Maui approached, placed herself over her body, and rocked back and forth. Eleanor's body was visited by elephants from five separate families over the course of a week. Elephants have been seen carrying the remnants of family members, including jawbones and tusks, on several occasions.

A giraffe with a malformed foot was born in 2010 and had difficulty walking. The calf lived for only four weeks. On the day the calf died, 22 other females and four juveniles surrounded and nuzzled the body. The mother was alone on the third morning and still hadn't eaten, which giraffes do all the time. Instead, she waited by her dead calf, even after hyenas devoured it. Scientists have also begun quantifying other creatures' reactions to death. In 2006, researchers examined baboon feces for glucocorticoids, stress hormones that rise during bereavement in humans. They compared samples from females who had lost a close relative in a predator assault to those from females who had not. And they discovered that the glucocorticoid levels of baboons who had died were considerably greater a month later. These baboons then increased their grooming behavior and the number of grooming partners they had, so extending and strengthening their social networks.

Their glucocorticoid levels returned to normal after two months. Researchers have also observed primate moms performing seemingly contradictory actions while carrying their deceased young. As an example, the moms alternated between cannibalizing or dragging their child's corpse and delicately transporting or grooming it, implying that the mothers were feeling conflicting urges toward the bodies. Our current comprehension of other animals' mental landscapes is woefully restricted. More research is needed to gain a deeper understanding of grief in the animal kingdom. But where does this leave us for the time being?

Conversations over whether non-human animals have emotions, such as grief, can be emotionally charged, in part because the decisions have very real consequences, such as deciding whether orcas should be segregated and kept in captivity, or whether dairy cows should be separated from their newborn calves. Should we treat non-human animals as if they have the capacity to grieve until we have more data on the subject? Or do you assume they don't? Which belief is more dangerous?