To Deny Animals Grieve For Their Dead Is To Deny Evolution

By Darryl Mason

A detail from this photo of chimpanzees in a Cameroon rescue centre silently watching the body of their 50 year old matriarch being carried away, after she died of heart failure :

"That animals and humans share many traits including emotions is merely an extension of Charles Darwin's accepted ideas about evolutionary continuity, that the differences between species are differences in degree rather than differences in kind. The seemingly natural human urge to impart emotions on to animals, far from obscuring the "true" nature of animals, may actually reflect a very accurate way of knowing."

Religion, no doubt, and fear of mockery in scientific circles, has long kept inquiring minds away from examining just how widespread displays of grief and mourning are in the animal kingdom.

We once believed that to acknowledge an ape can mourn a dead infant, or that elephants will visit the corpse of a fallen friend and stand guard to protect the body from scavengers, for a short time anyway, in ways that seemed shockingly familiar of our ceremonies and feelings of loss, was to somehow lessen the advanced, emotional, empathic superiority of humans.

How wrong we were.

Some animals have far more empathy for the dead of their genetically similar species than humans do.

Here's AA Gill writing in the Sunday Times of the "naughty fun" he felt in shooting a baboon, basking in the Tanzanian sun, through the lung, from a safe distance :

I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch. Shot it dead.

So I’m in Africa, in a hat, with dark intentions and a truck full of guns and other blokes in hats. Josh the hunter said: “Why don’t we shoot a baboon?” All nonchalant, looking out of the window at the amazing Tanzanian acacia scrub that drifts into the Serengeti plain. What about a baboon?

And here’s the thing. If you tool around the beautiful and unruly bits of Africa long enough in the company of gangs of men in purposeful hats, sooner or later you’re going to do baboon.

So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer.

They know that bipedal hominids in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, in great gambolling gangs, babies riding their mums like little jockeys.

And then they stand around on rocks and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses...

So there was this big bloke leaning against a rock, picking his fingernails, a hairy geezer sitting in the sun with his shirt off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out.

The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe.

Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot.

I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films: guns and bodies, barely a close-up of reflection or doubt. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?

AA Gill didn't hang around to watch the baboon's relatives and friends grieve over the corpse.


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