Review: Joy Williams on Studying Animal Grief
When scholarship and arrogance converge
Susana Monsó is a Spanish philosophy professor who has written a book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. It has a bright pink cover and has received an inordinately respectful amount of attention. The subject of Playing Possum is comparative thanatology—a groovy new interdisciplinary field that examines non-human animals’ concept of death and their expressions of grief or confusion in the face of it, the study of the sorrow and bereavement practices being more interesting perhaps than confronting our appalling cruelty and indifference to them. Why, it’s like we’d prefer not to have them around us at all! Except those we want/need/prefer to eat.
Monsó’s book is a pop production—it’s not just the giddy pink cover—grafted onto a prestigious university press. Silly opposites—the anarcho-punk teenager and his Catholic grandmother; Lois Lane and Clark Kent—are set up as parameters of comprehension. Sprinkled throughout are curious asides such as “with respect to the minimal concept of death, this is all for now … I hope you’re still there” and, regarding one primate’s cleverness, “a round of applause, while we’re at it, for this baboon.” It’s a potluck of other papers and studies (some going back to the fifties), scoops of scientific equivocation, doses of classroom definition and instruction:
Grief should not be confused with a concept of death
A good definition of death is non-functionality and irreversibility
Thanatosis is different from toxic immobility
Anthropomorphism is not anthropocentrism;
insufferable chapter headings (“The Ant Who Attended Her Own Funeral,” “The Dog Who Mistook His Human for a Snack”); and snarky asides (“dolphins get weirded out if they hear a signature whistle that doesn’t correspond to the conspecific whose urine they’re currently tasting. Yes, you read that right”).
The book is also littered with tiny, dark photographs, mostly of chimpanzees dragging their dead babies around or grooming their mother’s corpse. But there’s also a photo of dolphins trying to keep a dying “conspecific” afloat and one of an elephant (Grace) attempting to lift another (Eleanor) to her feet—this from a 2006 paper by an I. Douglas-Hamilton, et al., entitled “Behavioral Reactions of Elephants Towards a Dying and Deceased Matriarch.” The poor quality the photos is undoubtedly deliberate. For there is something illicit about viewing them, something a bit shabby on our part in scrutinizing images of great disordered troubling grief, of animals resisting anguish, of animals resisting absence, resisting loss.
The original Spanish title of Playing Possum is Zarigüeya de Schrödinger—"Schrodinger’s Possum,” an even more misleading clue as to Monsó’s purported subject of interest. Philosopher and physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous postulate that an unobservable cat in a box is both alive and dead at the same time was a reductio ad absurdum, a gag meant to illustrate the incoherence of a then-prevailing view of quantum mechanics.
Any attempt to push Monsó’s book as philosophy is bound to fail as it lacks both lucid inquiry and nimble argument. Even as a curated case study of animal behavior, it is scant on both originality and conviction. The style veers between the stolid (and quite disorganized) academic and the disconcertingly flippant personal. It certainly has none of the elegance or intent of two very different and more impassioned books—How Animals Grieve, by the biological anthropologist Barbara King, who admitted to the hope that by knowing more about animals’ complex lives we would have more compassion and respect for them, and the remarkable novel about elephants, The White Bone, by the Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy.
It would be hard to determine who Monsó’s book is intended for had she not so helpfully addressed this in her introduction. It was written for readers “with no previous knowledge of animal cognition or emotions and particularly aimed at people who are skeptical of animals possessing mind.” “These readers should find in this book, at minimum, some food for thought,” she suggests, setting expectations appropriately low. By the end, however, her ambitions have coalesced somewhat and she reveals the payoff for us, the readers.
Scientists have been trying for a long time to find a characteristic that will definitely separate us from the other species. So far all candidates have fallen. Neither the use of tools, nor culture, morality, or rationality are exclusive of human beings. Nor is a concept of death. We’re not a unique species. We’re just another animal … Perhaps if we come to terms with the fact that we’re animals we may also reconcile with our own mortality.
Perhaps. When we humans and the leaders we elect to represent our being human are through with this planet and there are few, if any, of these other animals to observe, ok then, maybe. Maybe some coming to terms might be in order. As long as we’re still talking about ourselves at the end.
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Joy Williams is the author of four collections of stories, a book of essays, and five novels. Her most recent books are Harrow and Concerning the Future of Souls. Here new book of short stories, The Pelican Child, will appear in November. Find her other Book Post reviews here.
Yesterday the White House Press Office removed dedicated access for wire services to the White House Press Pool, after a federal judge barred it from denying access to the wire service Associated Press because the AP continues to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico. Assignments to the press pool were determined by the White House Correspondents’ Association until the administration took it over in February. Local news outlets without their own White House correspondents rely on the wire services for coverage.
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