Ross Andersen writes:

Moni the chimpanzee was still new to the Dutch zoo when she lost her baby. The keepers hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. Neither did Zoë Goldsborough, a graduate student who had spent months jotting down every social interaction that occurred among the chimps, from nine to five, four days a week, for a study on jealousy. One chilly midwinter morning, Goldsborough found Moni sitting by herself on a high tree stump in the center of her enclosure, cradling something in her arms. That she was by herself was not surprising: Moni had been struggling to get along with the zoo’s 14 other chimps. But when Goldsborough edged closer, she knew that something was wrong. Moni had a newborn, and it wasn’t moving.

Goldsborough raced downstairs to a room where the zookeepers were preparing food for the chimps, and told them what she’d seen. At first, they didn’t believe her. They said that Moni was probably just playing with some straw. After the keepers saw the baby with their own eyes, they entered the enclosure and tried to take it away from her. Moni wouldn’t part with it. They decided to wait and try again.

By this point, another female chimp named Tushi was lingering nearby. Tushi was one of Goldsborough’s favorites. A few years earlier, she’d achieved global fame for executing a planned attack on a drone that was recording the chimps for a documentary. Long before that, she’d had a miscarriage of her own. For Tushi, the sight of Moni and her baby may have brought back that memory, or even just its emotional contours. For the next two days, she stayed near Moni, who held the tiny carcass. Finally, in a tussle with the keepers, it fell from Moni’s grasp and Tushi snatched it up and refused to give it back. Moni grew extremely agitated. The keepers separated Tushi in a private room. Moni pounded at the door.

Goldsborough wasn’t sure how to interpret this behavior. Moni seemed to have been driven by fierce maternal attachment, an emotion that is familiar to humans. Tushi could have been responding to an echo of this feeling from deep in her past. But it’s not clear that either of the chimps really understood what had happened to the baby. They may have mistakenly believed that it would come back to life. It’s telling that we can’t say for certain, even though chimpanzees are among our nearest—and most closely watched—neighbors on the tree of life.

This past June, more than 20 scientists met at Kyoto University for the largest-ever conference on comparative thanatology—the study of how animals experience death. The discipline is small, but its literature dates back to Aristotle. In 350 B.C.E., he wrote about a pair of dolphins that he’d seen gliding beneath the surface of the Aegean Sea, supporting a dead calf, “trying out of compassion to prevent its being devoured.” Most of the literature in comparative thanatology consists of anecdotes like these. Some are short, like Aristotle’s, but others, like the story of Moni and her baby, which was published in the journal Primates in 2019, and to which we shall return, contain extraordinary social details.

Scientists would like to go beyond these isolated scenes. They want to understand what feelings surge inside animals when they lose kin. They want to know whether animals are haunted by death, as we are. [Continue reading…]