How Animals Grieve

Death, and its attendant grief, is on that infamous shortlist of two things that are sure in life. But are humans alone in understanding death? To prepare for reviewing Susana Monsó's new book Playing Possum, I reach back in time to 2013 to a highly relevant book that has been sitting on my shelf unread for too long. In How Animals Grieve, anthropologist Barbara J. King mines a compelling vein of anecdotes that strongly suggest this emotion is not uniquely human.

This is largely a book of stories and observations made by scientists, zookeepers, pet owners, and others who share their lives with animals. King introduces you to elephants who will seek out the bones of fallen comrades to caress and explore them with their nimble trunks. There are heartbreaking tales of dolphins keeping afloat dead calves and monkeys carrying around dead infants, to the point of corpses starting to rot and mummify. Pet owners who have had multiple cats, dogs, or rabbits widely report how survivors are affected by the loss of a companion that they have spent years with. Primatologists have recorded strong responses in chimpanzees and gorillas to the death of fellow apes. There are touching stories here of cross-species friendships on farms and sanctuaries followed by signs of grief when one of the two partners dies. How Animals Grieve flows over with stories that will tug at your heartstrings.

King, while moved by these stories, keeps her composure and examines the matter with the eyes of a scientist. There are noticeable commonalities when a companion dies: distress, loss of appetite and weight, a lacklustre or dejected attitude with a loss of interest in one's environment, acting out, displays of aggression, etc. Animals of many stripes show such behaviours. An initial and, by her admission, not completely perfect definition of animal grief hinges on two ingredients. First is love as evidenced by a strong drive to be close to each other. Second is the suffering that follows when animals can no longer be together. "When we find animal grief, we are likely to find animal love, and vice versa. It's as if the two share emotional borders" (p. 10).

Particularly interesting is the neurobiological work on animal grief that King discusses here. The authors of a 2011 study looked at the biology of depression and observed that stress has a neurophysiological impact, leading to brain damage. The resultant inflammatory response to repair it leads to psychological pain. Is this what we experience as grief? King quotes one of the authors who summarises their findings thus: "Grief is an evolved behavioral program, akin to sickness behavior, that promotes convalescence during a significant neural rewriting job" (p. 50). It responds to earlier work by John Archer who in The Nature of Grief instead argued that grief might be evolutionarily maladaptive but also an unavoidable corollary of a more useful separation response that drives individuals to reunite when separated.

King admits that not all examples she discusses here are airtight. When we move away from primates and other social mammals, gauging what is going on becomes harder. Do intelligent birds such as corvids grieve? Experts think they do, but probably not for very long. And what about sea turtles? Hawai'ian locals who in 2008 erected a memorial for a slaughtered turtle observed a male visiting it and sticking around for hours. King admits it is hard to know what was going on here, despite the spin immediately put on it by media reports. Some cases may seem far-fetched but I am reminded of Safina's pithy conclusion in Beyond Words about how humans and other animals are all shaped by the same evolutionary forces: "beneath the skin, kin" (p. 324 therein). We are all built on the same meat-and-bones platform, running on the same bio-logic, if you will. This is an area ripe for further study and drives home a point King makes midway through the book: "We won't have a hope of finding [...] grief until we look for it" (p. 105).

I want to call out three take-home messages. First, King early on highlights that, though death and grief often co-occur, they do not have to. Grief does not require "a cognitive mastering of the concept of death" (p. 14) and not grieving is not equal to not understanding death. This distinction will be particularly relevant when we next turn to Monsó's book Playing Possum. However, King muddies the water somewhat: despite this caveat, she almost exclusively discusses grief in the context of death, with other contexts only given incidental mention and not explicitly examined. Is, as Monsó highlights, such data simply not available because of the anthropocentric biases in what researchers choose to study? If so, King does not comment on it, nor call for researchers to examine grief in other contexts.

Second, and tying in with this, King highlights both intra- and interspecific variation in grief. Intraspecific variation means that not all individuals of a species will express grief, though that for King does not negate the phenomenon at large. Furthermore, especially in primates, we have clear examples of individuals showing different responses to death. Interspecific variation means that there is no universal way of grieving across species: "Goat grief [...] is not chicken grief [...] is not chimpanzee grief or elephant grief or human grief" (p. 7). As an anthropologist, she thinks humans are exceptional in being able to anticipate future grief when someone falls ill, sometimes months or years ahead of time. However, acknowledging such differences "need not amount to a manifesto of human superiority" (p. 147). Asking whether our grief is deeper than that of other animals misses the point for her.

Third, the study of animal grief has value for anthropology. We have scattered evidence of purposeful burials far back into prehistory, but were these accompanied by grief and mourning? Archaeology cannot answer this question, but the body of observations discussed here can help, suggesting that grief has deep evolutionary roots. King is quick to qualify this: "It is only emotional *capacity* that this comparative context illuminates, though, and we would do well to keep in mind that the capacity to experience an emotion doesn't always result in the *expression* of that emotion" (p. 159).

How Animals Grieve is a compelling and thought-provoking book. To my mind, King leaves little doubt that we are not alone in experiencing grief, even if the details differ between species. The consequences of what that means for how we treat animals are only all too briefly explored here, beyond her acknowledgement that we are often the cause of animal grief. If books by Carl Safina, Frans de Waal, or Marc Bekoff resonate with you, this book will too.