What Animals Think of Death

It doesn’t take more than an encounter with a house cat to see how their hunting instincts work. They’re just not triggered by dead things.

- How are you so sure, human?

I hate how we abuse animals just because we can. It's very cruel and primitive. But this entire planet is cruel and primitive because that's the general state of consciousness of leaders and corporations.

If we were to balance on the one hand a human life and the life of a fish or deer or cow or chicken, I'd be hard-pressed to essay them as equivalent. And yet, if anyone should threaten to inflict suffering or harm upon my pet, I would react with violence if need be, to whatever extent I could muster to prevent any harm to my little pal (an awe-inspiringly predatious indoors cat). And yet I recognize that such a threat-reaction is, in itself, reducible to an evolutionary-biologically trained threat-reaction.

Article thesis:

> "...the widespread notion that only humans can understand death stems from an overly complex view of this concept".

This appears non-controversial to me, merely a hasty set decoration to buy the audience's indulgence -- an argument which yet needs recourse to the hedge "overly complex". What can follow but a recitation of interesting factoids (which would be more compelling without the sententiousness) or the grinding of an axe?

> What I want to argue is that, if thanatosis has evolved, it’s because there are some advantages – regardless of the concrete form they take – to appearing specifically as though one were dead.

This is like taking up the courageous position that water is wet. Predators don't need to learn, of necessity, that yellow and black markings indicate venom. This is an Encyclopedia Britannica entry dressed up as a school report on natural selection, the guilty license for which was planted by tacking on "overly complex" to the thesis.

If the author actually had something to say, perhaps she reached her word-count too soon or merely failed to perceive the essential distinction: what various modes of awareness of death may tell us about consciousness in animals. Or possibly, we just don't know enough to say anything clearly on this topic (in which case, I would have much preferred the assistant professor in the department of logic, history, and philosophy of science to simply lay out nakedly what her intuitions are for weighing and examination).

I'm a non-native English speaker, but with the SJW thing in the US, nothing about genders really surprises me. As a rule of thumb, I'd say that putting some "she" here and there never hurts and always beats consistency. Not sure if that's what's at play here. Maybe they just want to "personify" the animals to make the story more touching.

Well, the opossum is named "Virginia", so it is only natural to use "she". As a comic in all seriousness, though, the usage here did confuse me because I thought the implication was that only female opossums exhibited this behavior. Better style would have been to use "it" and not wade into the scrum around which pronoun to use when human gender is indefinite.