If Charles can do it, I can do it to.
I come across this interesting bit of information. I wished I learned this at the beginning of the year when we were debating the consciousness of animals in relation to death.
But it has been discovered and documented that elephants have funerals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Death_ritual
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cnb7Gix218
Elephants will inspect the corpses for dead elephants even if they are not in the same herd. Some will inspect the bones cautiously touching it with their trunks. Other elephants will just respectively have a few moments of silence while gazing at their fallen brother.
What do you think this implies about elephants thinking of death? Does this imply that they are conscious of their own demise? Are we misinterpreting them? What sort of behavior would an animal have to exhibit that would prove they are conscious of their own death?
I think we as humans misinterpret any type of animals when it comes to death. This implies that elephants have emotion and that they are conscious of their own demise. This kind of behavior, that the elephant showed, proved that they were conscious of their own death. When my cat died, the other cats and even dogs in the house knew something was wrong and they were not the same for awhile. Every animal understands death in a certain way. They have the same sense that we have when it comes to losing someone we care about.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Stef on this point, I think that because we can't talk to the directly, we assume that we have nothing in common with them. It is said that some animals like dogs and cats know when they are dying and often run away because they do not want their owners knowing they are dying..that would mean that they know of their own demise.
DeleteI wanted to agree with these two ladies as well. I think that it is completely ignorant of the human race to think animals are less than we are. Just because we cannot communicate with them is no reason to doubt their intelligence, maybe we should question our own intelligence. I also wanted to say that feelings are definitely evident in animals. Like humans much of our communication is through our non-verbals. I know from personal experience, like Steff and Morgan, that animals can portray their feelings and are affected by deaths. I have seen this in my own pets. They grieve the loss of their friends and can be seen by their actions and behaviors. This to me explains that animals understand death.
DeleteAnnie, I could not agree with you more that we should question our own intelligence. The fact that some people do not believe that pets have emotions or are affected by death obviously do not own pets. I think they are just like humans, except with 4 legs ;)
DeleteI find it interesting that they have a sort of ritual whenever they find a dead elephant. I cannot really form an opinion about the elephants' view of death because I am not (and to the best of my recollection, have never been) an elephant. I think that animals are aware of death just from the fact that many animals go to a secluded spot where they can be alone when they die. However, beyond that, I am not sure if humans will ever truly know the answers to some of these questions.
ReplyDeleteYeah, if you were an elephant you would never forget it.
DeleteI agree with Stefaney and Charles. I think animals have a vague knowledge about death and that they know it could happen to them. However, I don't think that animals can relate to death as we understand it. In other words, I don't think that animals go around asking themselves, "Will today be my last?"
ReplyDeleteI know that animals can usually sense pain and when something is wrong they know. They tend to become sad and they are a lot more gentle and calm.
I think that most animals are conscious of their own demise. This particular case involves elephants, but I know that geese kind of have their own "funeral" (if you will) when another goose dies. They usually gather around it (forming a circle) and honk at it, as if they think it is going to come back to life.
Either way I find it interesting that elephants have their own ritual for other elephants that have passed away.
If we presuppose that animals do have the ability to understand death, I don't think we can apply our own common human reactions to those specific emotions to the animals. They have a completely different way of interpreting their surroundings, and their brains are different from humans. I'll give the example of a chimp smiling for instance. Smiling is seen around the world, at least in humans, as an outward expression of happiness. It's not even necessarily a conscious thought, but more of an automatic response to feeling joy. In chimps however, smiling is a sign of being afraid. If other animals do have their own emotions, they may physically express themselves differently than humans.
ReplyDeleteVery excellent point!Species have vastly different methods of expression Humans have a knack for expression unable to be processed by most animals. Just think of all the various facial gestures made possible by the cornucopia of facial muscles. Even our babies can imply surprise, confusion, joy, anger, curiosity,etc. I may have be more human bias just because I spend a lot more time around human faces than others. But I think its a fairly conservative claim when I say human body language is more developed than other species.
DeleteFirst off, this is really cool mainly because my favorite animal is the elephant. Second off, I do not think that elephants or other animals are concious of their demise but are able to understand something is wrong. Being that we only understand animals to a certain extent, who is to say whether or not they are able to process something outside of just "my elephant friend seems to be dead" and they just express it in ways we do not understand (Elephant language).
ReplyDeleteI don't think that animals are conscious of death, or at least, their own personal demise. They must be aware of death in some context, seeing as many are carnivores who are reliant on death as a source of food. Granted, elephants aren't carnivores, so they probably don't have the same experience with death as say, a lion, tiger, or bear. I am inclined to say that the ritual we observe is more of a fact-gathering thing...elephants surround the corpse/bones and try to figure out what happened to the best of their abilities. I'm not saying they have problem solving abilities, but there are things like smell, sounds, etc. that they may be capable of determining as illness or a predator. Being able to determine a possible risk associated with the corpse may be instinctual and performed to increase the living elephants likelihood of survival.
ReplyDeleteI believe as humans we want to have other animals or beings also be aware of death. Isn't it kind of lonely being the only animals on earth who know that we will die? Who hold that dread of death? So, we seek out other species that we can also attribute this dread or acknowledgement of death. It comforts us. Maybe we will discover animals, and who says these elephants aren't aware of their own demise? But just through observation, we can't say they are either.
Hmm... I'm not sure if making connections between our behavior and those of animals imply loneliness. That would imply that any instance of anthropomorphism can be contributed to the need that we want other species to share our characteristics. Our bias in anthropomorphising animals stems from the fact that being human is all we know. Expressive gestures a chimp makes are better understood to us from a human perspective than a dolphins perspective. If a person sees elephants having a funeral and concludes that they are aware of their own death, it would probably stem from induction of the human grief onto the elephants psyche rather than a need to share a pattern of grief with another animal.
DeleteI think that we may be misinterpreting their behavior when we imply that they are aware of their own deaths. That would imply that animals have sentience. However, they may be aware that their "fallen brother" is no longer alive. They may be vaguely aware, as Chelsea and Katie mention, that death means the end of life, but they might not put high value on death as humans do. To call this ritual a "funeral" may be putting too much meaning into their understanding of life and death. Who knows what those few moments of silence really mean? Perhaps the elephant is in shock that something that once was living is now not moving or breathing. "How could this be?" is part of the shock value the elephant might feel, but who is to say that it is having a funeral of sorts for his brother?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you in a sense, this ritual does not prove that animals think about their own death. The "fallen brother" phrase was a hyperbole. But they definitly are sentient.
DeleteSentience- the ability to feel, perceive, or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Of course animals have sentience, they are aware of their surroundings they can think, and feel. Rocks, machines, and plants are things we typically label non-sentient. You could rationalize that all animals actions as something instinctual that they do not have control over. But if you say that their ability to solve problems using critical thinking, their ability to communicate, their ability to learn, their differences in personality, are results of an unperceptive unconscious decision pattern; what's to say that humans aren't sentient.
For fear of starting a heated and potentially hostile argument, I will keep my opinions limited in this post as I have made my position clear in our class discussion earlier this semester. I simply feel the need to put my two cents in.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the statement that the other animals' concept of death is very different from ours but that does not mean that it does not carry the same weight and pull of emotion. To say that animals do not have emotion is a flawed statement as there are many example in nature of a display of emotion among wild animals.
One comment that did not sit well with me was the implication that animals do not have problem solving capabilities. While this is generally a sign of higher brain function, this does not mean that it is limited to human mental capacity. There are plenty of lab and observable nature examples of problem solving abilities in many species of animals.
from Brandon
ReplyDeleteHaha... D.O.B makes a very good point, language outside of the U.S. and animal kingdom is foreign to us and so what we see and make assumptions of may not be the language of that kind thats the actual meaning. To an extent i feel animals are conscious of their demise but who is to say that the elephants standing there are really having a moment of silence? Maybe they are trying to figure out why this elephant has their guts cut open or what in the world is this bone like structure is.
At Cornell University, there is a program of study for the language of elephants. They are interpreting elephant "talk". There was a program on the Discovery channel which showed the elephant's emotional reaction after one died. I think that there is no doubt that the elephants can to an extent comprehend when one dies and show different emotions. It was almost a type of ritual when the one died. The elephants seemed to somewhat react in the same way each time one of them died. Whether this is intentional or not I'm not sure but I think that they have a bit of an understanding of what has happened (but not exactly in the same way as humans). Even though they may not be aware that they are going to die (a defining characteristic of humans) they sense that something has happened to a fellow elephant.
ReplyDeleteI believe that all animals can understand what death is in their own way, not so much how a human does though. I liked the example that Stefaney put earlier about how her other pets reacted to her cats death. I can relate to this because I remember when my cat named Pepper died back in 2007 and out other cat Angel (who we still have today) started becoming more hostile towards out two other cats and became a loner from that point on and still is today. Angel seemed to only get along with Pepper while he was alive. I think this has to do with the fact that Angel was much younger than Pepper and she came in at a young age and got used to him early on. It would only make sense that animals would feel some kind of loneliness or pain ( in human terms) if a fellow pet that they interacted with everyday was all of a sudden gone or even when they were dying not acting the way they usually did. So I do agree that animals have their own way of interpreting death as "something wrong".
ReplyDeleteThis about the elephants I feel as if I've heard before. I don't remember if it was in this class, however, it does sound familiar. It has been said that elephants never forget, so why would they forget their relatives? Just like some humans, less these days, elephants still visit the graves of their relatives. I don't see how it could be that far off that animals have similar consciousness as we do. In any animal, you can see emotion coming from then. When looking at a dog, when they are sad, their whole face shows it, their actions show it, and how they communicate shows. While it may not be as advanced as humans.
ReplyDeleteI have actually seen this Elephant video before. I as well, loved the example that Stefaney gave about how her other animals reacted to her cats death. I can vouch for this because I have had a somewhat similar situation with a beloved family dog. When she passed away, you could tell a significant change in our animals behavior pattern. Where we buried her, out other dogs stayed out at the place of burial into the next morning and then returned to our garage. I know there is a gray area here, but when you have first-hand experience on the matter your perspective significantly changes.
ReplyDeleteI dont know about anyone else but reading this story made me think about the elephant graveyard scene from The Lion King. Whether animals are conscious of what death actually is or not, Elephants are clearly acknowledging that other elephants have passed. I personally believe that all animals have their own way of communicating and just because we dont understand it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. After watching the video of the elephant "funeral" I think there is no doubt that these animals are showing their respects to their fellow elephant.
ReplyDeleteThat is honestly really cool. I think animals are completely conscious of their own death. For example when dogs know they are going to die they walk away from their owner. I absolutely believe animals are conscious of it. they may not fully understand it the way people do, but they know enough about it in my opinion.
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