Playing Possum

How Animals Understand Death

Susana Monsó

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780691260778
  9780691260761
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691260853
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

How animals conceive of death and dying—and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortality

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.

With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today’s leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.

Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• More praise for Playing Possum
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword, by Mark Rowlands
• 1. Introduction: The Silence of the Chimps
• 2. The Ant Who Attended Her Own Funeral
• 3. The Whale Who Carried Her Baby Across Half the World
• 4. The Ape Who Played House with Corpses
• 5. The Dog Who Mistook His Human for a Snack
• 6. The Elephant Who Collected Ivory
• 7. The Opossum Who Was Both Dead and Alive
• 8. Conclusion: The Animal Who Brought Flowers to the Dead
• Acknowledgments for the Spanish Edition
• Acknowledgments for the English Edition
• Notes
• Image Credits
• Index