Do Animals Know That They Will Die? | Hacker News Reader

Do Animals Know That They Will Die?

theatlantic.com

95 pointsXzetaU867 comments

I once saw a group of ranchers butcher a cow in the plains of Paraguay. They had an area of the farm where the cows were slaughtered -- the area was a small patch of grass under a large tree. As the ranchers brought a cow near the tree and tied its tether to it, the cow started shaking and making strange sounds -- sounds you wouldn't expect from a cow. She knew she was about to be slaughtered. The shaking got worse and the cow eventually defecated and peed itself. As the rancher pulled out his knife, the cow started aggressively pulling on the tether and started howling. The cow knew it was going to die. That brief moment left quite an impression on me.

That is just so sad, and makes me rethink my eating habits. Or at least who I purchase from.

I do remember that people like this have studied animal behavior more closely and used it to make the design of slaughterhouses more humane. But interestingly she also observed that animals have the ability to hide pain:

https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/temple-grandin-on-why-slaug...

Yes, actually all animals know to hide their pain. Why ? Because they have to.

When a predator sees a group of possible preys, the first thing he does is to observe them to detect the weakest one. Hence the weakest animal has to hide his pain/sickness and pretend to be ok.

In this context, when female mammals give birth, they automatically eat their placenta and lick the blood on the floor: to leave almost no traces that would give clues to predators that birth has taken place (to protect their offspring, in other words)

Placenta is also very nutritive.

Likewise when many animals vomit they eat the vomit again, especially predators where the food is hard won and highly dense in nutrition. Finding food is really difficult in nature and something as high quality as a placenta is not reasonable to waste.

Reminds me of the The Katering Show. They did an episode on making placenta lasagna, called plasagna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LhgJjicMz8

I don’t know how you’re going to change your buying habits to avoid this. The story described actually sounds humane. There is no awesome way to kill an animal for slaughter. The entire point also was the animals knew when you’re taken to this place you don’t come back and die. This involves an intelligence and knowledge of mortality and the past, which in an animal farm that slaughters their own cattle, is unavoidable. My experience is even at farms that transport for slaughter the animals know this is where past animals have disappeared to and the anxiety can be very high among animals.

I always find it surprising people think animals aren’t aware of mortality, their impending death, etc. Spending time with animals it becomes clear, at least in my experiences, that the primary difference between their experience and ours is the ability to communicate it and that life writ large has a very similar existential experience.

I agree with a lot of what you wrote. And I too find it surprising how people often downplay animal sentience and awareness, and capacity for suffering. There is ample evidence of these in primates, cetaceans, birds such as corvids, and domestic animals like dogs and cats.

But killing a large animal, like a cow, by hand using a knife is hardly "humane" or "unavoidable". The slaughtered animal would experience severe pain and awareness of its situation before it eventually loses consciousness.

If done right the time of awareness is brief when slaughtering with a knife. A bolt gun is better for sure but not guaranteed by any measure. The truth is it is more about the person than the tool - their experience, thoughtfulness, and compassion.

But the suffering doesn’t start with the fatal injury and suffering is often less about pain and more about the torment of what’s about to happen. That’s true for people and for animals. IMO that’s the point

I wonder how animals understand death, because to understand death they'd need to understand consciousness and the lack of it, and I feel like that's human level complex thinking. Animals have logic, of course, IF predator is coming at me THEN I have to run for my life BECAUSE ... because they run on instinct? Because their herd does the same? Because they've learnt about what death is?

Mountain goats have probably slipped and fallen off cliffs, but I doubt they have fear of heights. Interestingly they probably are able to calculate whether a jump is doable or not, but do they doubt themselves? I guess cats and dogs show doubt..

I think it’s strange to believe as evolved animals like them we somehow evolved awareness of ourselves when nothing else did and every other animals is basically a reactionary meat machine operating on preprogrammed instinct. This feels like something more likely intensely fundamental to most animals but our lack of experience with them in our life makes us doubt. But pet owners know for a fact their pets are aware and think and feel in some approximate way to how we do. I think life, death, and consciousness are all hallmarks of most animals experience. In fact I think it’s fundamental to adaptability to complex and new experiences in the wild and survival and is why complex animals are more complex on their behavior than say single celled animals.

Having seen a cow killed with a captive bolt gun, and a pig with a knife, I think the difference is abysmal, and the first way is "awesome" in comparison.

A captive bolt gun costs $200. If you kill your cows with a knife, you must have some kind of problem in your head.

Their ability to communicate with us. I’m sure they communicate among themselves just fine. Us humans just unilaterally decided that inter species communication is a requirement for sentience, even though we’re also incapable of it.

> Or at least who I purchase from.

There is no ethical slaughter.

Oh man, that’s horrible, that definitely makes me rethink my eating habits as well, oy

This is why we need cellular agriculture

I lived across from a farm in Ireland for a few years, and sometimes I heard the most horrible wailing coming from the barn across the road. It was about 180 meters away, so quite loud.

I asked a mutual neighbour the next day "were they slaughtering the cows last night?" And they just said "oh, no, they just took the calves away and the cows get sad".

As a parent myself I feel worse about dairy than beef. Weirdly I think I'd be more comfortable eating a carnivore than an herbivore. That feels more "fair", in a sense. But it's a horrendously inefficient way to get calories.

Oddly this is one of the things factory farms try to do better. From what I have heard, because they don't have time to deal with spooked cattle when killing so many of them, the whole killing area is designed so they don't know what's coming until the last moment.

Factory farms do not make animals suffer less, quite the opposite

No, factory farms are indifferent to suffering. The suffering or wellbeing of the animals means absolutely nothing either way unless it affects efficiency or profit.

Factory farms optimize efficiency and profit, not suffering. That the most efficient and profitable methods tend to cause greater suffering is merely a coincidence.

There is no malice, just indifference.

Looks like you're making up a strawman to ague with. But either way, I hope no one is ever indifferent to the suffering of you or your family. Sounds like hell.

"Factory farm" is the wrong term to use here. This is specifically about the slaughterhouse, which might have almost no connection with the farm.

Beautiful read!

*Personal side story with death of a bird in my hand

I must have been 10-12 years old, was playing on the street in front of my house. I noticed an injured bird was crying for help. I ran to it, lifted it in my hand to see what happened. It was clearly dying, I ran home and got some water. I gave it some water and it quickly drank as much as it could. While I was holding it in my hand, it looked at me with big round eyes and took its last breath. I could feel something leave its body and I felt it in my hand. I remember this often what it saw before dying, what was it thinking before dying.

They generally don't but they have instinct of survival(as all living beings) so they essentially want to live as long as they can. But mammals do have emotions and when they see their fellow buddy dead, they start to mourn. I remember watching documentary about monkeys and scientists put plastic monkey on the floor acting dead in front of group of monkeys and monkeys gathered together, hug each other and started crying, thinking the dead monkey was one of them. I think that was ephemeral emotion and thought but in that moment they knew that they can die too.

Maybe us, animals, don't have an instinct of survival. That's a bit of an assumption.

Maybe we have another very strong instinct and survival is just the observed side effect but not the operating driving force. Indeed, animals take mortal risks constantly.

It could also be that they we a variety of instincts in fight for domination and survival is just one of them but not the strongest one.

I've seen a hawk take down a rabbit, it's buddy right next to him ran around in circles for a bit because it was worried, and then started eating grass again as the hawk was pulling out the entrails that it didn't want right next to it. Definitely no mourning.

I think that rabbit would be scared to death and run away for his life(instinct of survival) and not run in circles confused. Emotions probably get amplified in group and btw small rabbit can't do anything physically to large strong hawk.

I again remember watching documentary when hyenas surrounded young lion and his older buddy came to help him and pushed off hyenas. So animal mammals defiantly have an emotional binding to the members of their specie, some more and some less.

Animals like rabbits are prey animals. The reproduce prodigiously as a species-survival mechanism. Individual deaths are common and while a predator is going to alarm them for a while, they will quickly get back to their primary business of eating and fucking. Mourning doesn't serve much of a purpose.

I'm not a biologist or a zoologist, these were just my observations and assumptions but I get it that animals "only" forage and reproduce. Mourning is primarily ephemeral/short act but humans and to some extent animal mammals still do it.

I think that only applies to social animals; the benefits of socializing are great but also incurs a large cognitive requirement in terms of being able to empathize, communicate, etc., which would naturally enable them to mourn, grieve, etc.

I slaughtered about 40 chickens once. I was probably around 19 at the time. My ex-girlfriend's dad just told me to get in the truck, asked his kids to stay at home, and took me to a chicken coop where him and his friend were raising chickens. I took them out of the coop, a few at a time, hung them upside down, and then killed them with a knife. After the first few, the rest in the coop began panicking even though they couldn't see what was going on. That really stood out to me. I'm sure they could hear or smell death. They knew what was coming.

During the harvesting of a pig, a farmer said to me that the pigs understand fear but do not understand death. Seemed pretty reasonable to me in how pigs reacted to their dead friends; they weren't much fazed.

I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that to a pig, a dead pig is just another meal.

It is possible that some of our now extinct sibling species also weren’t fazed that much by a dead fellow. It depends on default settings of a character and may be orthogonal to subj. The same stands for humans, some cultures celebrate the death.

Not really. Pigs will eat almost anything if they need to. But eating meat is one of the last things they'll eat before starving.

This is not my experience at all. And I’ve been quite shocked by what farmers I know have told me about how pigs treat injured brothers (eating them alive). And yea, they weren’t starving.

I am basically an animal intelligence/emotional range maximalist but that doesn’t mean they respond the same way we do.

Well, I can't speak to what conditions your pig farmer friends keep their pigs in, but none of the dozens of pigs I've ever raised had ever shown any kind of inclination towards cannibalism. Sows eating their own piglets is the closest I've heard in natural conditions, but there is probably some deeper evolutionary reason behind that and not just like "oh nice, an easy meal!"

Of course, the hypothesis that they are sufficiently aware of everything -- existing and being nurtured solely to be slaughtered, having already seen many friends die, if female having had many children stolen from them -- to be traumatized to the point of utter emotional breakdown and unfeeling is also consistent with said observation. Humans who have survived war crimes and horrific battles tend to go pretty dead-eyed too. Death might even be welcomed, as a deliverance.

I know these pigs hadn’t seen death or had that kind of loss. Your idea here is important, but overplayed. It’s important because we have not given animals enough credit, but it’s overplayed because you’re giving them way too much human characteristics. For starters, they don’t have language, so their depth of thought and feeling are not similar. Imagine what they think about the origins of food. Hint: basically zero idea. Their thoughts on death and loss will be similarly weak.

That you seem to consider yourself sufficiently expert and authoritative to declare the idea "overplayed" -- and that you consider this declaration something that will further readers' understanding (which I at least view as the goal here) -- is... let's say, interesting.

In any case, no, I certainly would not attribute to pigs human-level cognition. But certainly, the notion that language is a prerequisite for thought (at least up through the level of "solving a Sudoku puzzle", per some research) has been largely discarded [0]. And certainly, as omnivores (who will kill and/or consume members of their own species, occasionally including even their own offspring, as well as members of other species) I think it's reasonable to suppose that pigs would have an inkling that one being's death is another's meal. And fundamentally, there is ample reason to suppose that pigs are closer to human-like cognition than the vast majority of species on earth. (Anecdata: they make for difficult pets owing to their need for stimulation, they can play video games [1], and -- as any reputable animal scientist will tell you -- once you get past certain bare-minimum things like ending the use of gestation crates, the most important things for pig welfare in industry are not group housing or (beyond a certain point) extra space, but rather giving them toys and a sense of cleanliness via clean bedding.)

But feel free to provide evidence that attests that "[t]heir thoughts on death and loss will be similarly weak." I would certainly take it into consideration.

[0]: For a handy summary, see https://www.livescience.com/can-we-think-without-language

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56023720

The Onion: Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k

https://archive.ph/IyLgw

If out of all the species that ever existed, we're the only ones that understand our own mortality, it makes me wonder what else, by sheer probability, we have yet to understand.

What “understanding” actually means, for one.

> we're the only ones that understand our own mortality

Do we really though? Yes, we understand it on some level - but I think if we really understood that we will die things would look very different. Basically every religion has some cope around this topic.

A lot of Buddhists train for many years to 'understand' mortality, and even then I don't think all or even most of them truly grasp the impermanence of all things. The ones that do often find it a hard job to share their knowledge, even to the dedicated.

*** Going slightly tangential:

How much do some of us understand, that most people will never get? And what can we do about it?

A few people have a real understanding of how con artists, sociopathic CEOs, serial killers, war-mongering and corrupt politicians, etc, think and operate - but they can never really explain it to most people, even in books.

A lot of scams/lies work because most people would never think to be such an arsehole.

And there are good reasons for that - it can be damaging to your well-being, your wallet, and your social sphere to be the type of 'paranoid' that sees those things as they are. And even experts get scammed; we all have blind spots, bad days, brain farts etc.

Other examples: While nearly all people can 'feel' music, only a few can consistently bang out hit songs. Many people struggle with big numbers, and are therefore susceptible to all kinds of thinking errors. Others struggle with things like recognizing faces and remembering names, regardless of their kindness and empathy.

For all the work done in psychology about things like blind spots, the Dunning-Kruger effect, disorders etc, we are still in a position where openly attacking education is a valid political strategy.

So... I'm saying, we all have a lot to understand, and most of it will never be understood. I hope we can start organizing our culture to better accommodate this fact, but the resistance to any such change will be/is extreme.

The answer was no, probably not.

Beautiful story!

i've raised some cats, i think the answer is yes.

My cat recently passed away. I think she definitely knew she was done, at least for the last five days.

Cats die weirdly. In my experience, they get sick and pretend nothing is wrong for as long as they can. Then, they suddenly crawl into some hiding spot and try to quietly give up the ghost. Or when they're very plainly chronically sick (eg. renal failure, where they'll vomit all over the place, all the time), they might just drop dead on the spot, but not before trying to pretend everything is just 'super a-ok fine, I'm not nearly dead, what do you mean my hind legs are barely functional', for years.

Otoh we had a dog when I was a kid, and near the end you could just see the self-pity in its droopy eyes. 'No I will not go for a walk, can you see how miserable my existence has become? Woe is me.'

> Cats die weirdly. In my experience, they get sick and pretend nothing is wrong for as long as they can.

This is a survival instinct. They are predators but they are also prey. “Acting” sick or weak is a good way to get picked off by predators. That’s also why they hide when they are gravely ill. They don’t have the luxury of lounging around like a lion.

Cats have an instinct to find a place to hide, often far away, when near death. They live socially, and do this so that if a predator found the corpse it wouldn't jeopardize the rest of the colony.

I keep hearing stories about cats who "ran away and never came back". When a cat of mine grew old, despite being deaf, blind, and quite possibly addled with feline dementia, she would get up on shaky paws and try to find a nice well-concealed corner to hide in while awaiting the reaper. We eventually had her put to sleep, but I think we might've waited too long.

Possibly my favorite cat died two years ago after an extended viral illness. It was terrible. He was a feral cat and so lived outdoors in the summer heat. I had found him on the sidewalk, pulling his body with his front legs (his rear legs had failed). I carried his drooping form to his favorite spot in the front yard under the shade of bushes. I put ice in a towel around him to cool him.

Over the next two hours he lay there and cried to me as if to ask "Can't you do anything? What is happening to me?". I agree with you: they seem to know the end is near.

I could only pet him gently and talk to him softly, which seemed to calm him. His cat companion was quite upset, stayed around, but did not approach too closely.

After he died and rigor mortis set in, I retraced his path from where I found him back to our parking lot (a trail of bodily fluid remained). He had apparently been trying to eat something on the asphalt (I have seen this behavior before but don't know what it could be other than ingesting worms, bugs or plants, etc.) I carried his limp body to the front yard, dug him a suitable grave near a holly bush and lowered his body gently. His cat companion companion watched awhile but finally left, whereupon I lay the earth over one of the sweetest cats I've ever known.

Ok that was poignant and beautiful and made me cry. It somewhat echoes the recent premature deaths of two of our chickens. Unfortunately and illogically, I was overwhelmed with emotion when they died.

we had to euthanize one of our cats last year. she was quite anxious and uncomfortable during the trip to the vet. when the actual moment arrived, she curled up on my wife's lap and started purring quite loudly -- even before the initial anaesthetic was injected.

if you live with an animal for a while, you learn to read their emotions very well. i can't shake the conviction that she knew she was dying, that she maybe wasn't glad, but at least resigned to and accepting of her fate.

this is a lot of anthropomorphism, i know, no doubt catalyzed by my own intense emotions around losing her. but intuitively i'd say "yes, they know".

> you learn to read their emotions very well

it might well be that they "read" your (wife's) emotions and did not think much about dying.

When I was a young man the family dog developed some kind of huge cyst or tumor or something. My father, aunt, and cousin had died recently, which I suppose is why the dog didn’t get taken to the vet. Could simply have been bad finances.

The dog was leaking body fluids. I put a trash bag on the floor of the car and drove him to a place neither of us had ever been, the Humane Society. About a mile away he started to scream and shake. It was a human-sounding scream. It didn’t stop when we arrived. He tried weakly to bite me as I extracted him from the back seat, and didn’t stop screaming when I left.

I am not sure whether I would be more surprised by the truth being “no other animal at any point in life understands they will die” or “some animals at some point understand they will die.” I would be pretty confident that not all animals do. Excluding humanity of course. My gut feeling is one or more species can understand.

> Excluding humanity of course

Only 14.4% of humans on earth [0] don't believe in some religion, meaning the majority feel that you don't actually die, but just go somewhere else.

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/374704/share-of-global-p...

And how many _actually_ believe it? They may try to believe or hope but their behavior suggests the majority of the believers are not so sure after all.

The point stands: Many people don't understand death. They believe they are just going somewhere else.

I remember that as a kid, another kid explained death to me. At that time I couldn't grasp the full meaning of ceasing to exist.

where were you before the birth ? before the Big Bang? before the time itself? You go to the same place after the death--nothing new.

Literally everyone understands that they'll cease to exist one day, whether religious or non-religious. That some people hope there's something after this life doesn't mean they can't fathom a case where that isn't true.

That’s an example of why I phrased things as I did. At least one human understands they will die. If we prefer to define that as natural death, that’s acceptable for the purposes of this discussion. I was not referring to anything beyond that.

Just because people identify with some religion or other doesn't mean they believe whatever thing that religion says about death.

The first animal with infinite lifespan could happen at any moment.

According to some, it already did. It is called the Universe.

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