Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} How Grieve by Barbara J. King Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. How Animals Grieve by Barbara J. King. I'd like to tell you today about an orca named Tahlequah. Tahlequah is also known as J35 to scientists, because she swims with the J Pod in the Salish Sea. These are the waters off of British Columbia and Washington State. Now, last year, in July 2018, she was well along in her 17-month pregnancy, and scientists were very excited because no baby had survived in this pod for three long years. Now, orcas are also known as killer whales. They're profoundly social and profoundly intelligent beings. And scientists are very interested in their behavior, because in their social networks, they share habits, information and even affection. They create true cultures of the ocean. But this pod has been in trouble. The Chinook salmon that the orcas favor has been way down in the region, and pollution has been up. But on July 24th, Tahlequah gave birth to a daughter, and scientists were so excited by this development. But unfortunately, the same day — in fact, shortly after birth — the calf died. Well, what happened next electrified lovers across the world, because Tahlequah refused to let her baby slip off into the water. She kept it on her body and she swam with it. If it did fall off, she would dive and rescue it, and she battled stiff currents to do this. Now, she kept this behavior up for 17 days, and during this time, she swam over 1,000 miles. At that point, she let the little baby slip off into the water. So today, Tahlequah swims on with the J Pod, but her still moves me. And I do believe that "grief" is the right word to use. I believe that grief is the right word to use for numerous animals who mourn the dead. They may be friends or mates or relatives. Because these visible cues, these behavioral cues, tell us something about an animal's emotional state. Now, for the last seven years, I've been working to document examples of animal grief — in birds, in mammals, in domesticated animals and in wild animals — and I believe in the reality of animal grief. Now, I say it this way because I need to acknowledge to you right up front that not all scientists agree with me. And part of the reason, I think, is because of what I call the "a-word." The a-word is anthropomorphism, and historically, it's been a big deterrent to recognizing animal . So, anthropomorphism is when we project onto other animals our capacities or our emotions. And we can all probably think of examples of this. Let's say we have a friend who tells us, "My cat understands everything I say." Or, "My dog, he's so sweet. he ran right across the yard this morning towards a squirrel, and I know he just wants to play." Well, maybe. Or maybe not. I'm skeptical about claims like those. But animal grief is different, because we're not trying to read an animal's mind. We're looking at visible cues of behavior and trying to interpret them with some meaning. Now, it's true — scientists often push back at me, and they'll say, "Ah, look, the animal might be stressed, or maybe the animal's just confused because his or her routine has been disrupted." But I think that this overworry about anthropomorphism misses a fundamental point. And that is that animals can care very deeply for each other, maybe they even love each other. And when they do, a survivor's heart can be pierced by a death. Let's face it: if we deny evolutionary continuity, we are really missing out on embracing part of ourselves. So yes, I believe in the reality of animal grief, and I also think that if we recognize it, we can make the world a better place for animals, a kinder place for animals. So let me tell you a little bit more about animal grief. I'm going to start in Kenya. You see here there's an named Eleanor who came one day with bruised legs, and she collapsed. You see on the left that another female named Grace came to her right away and, using her own trunk, propped her up, tried to get her up on her feet. And she did succeed, but then Eleanor collapsed again. At this point, Grace became visibly distressed, and she prodded the body, and she vocalized. Eleanor collapsed again, and unfortunately, she did die. What you see on the right is a female from another family named Maui, who came after the death, and she stayed at the body. She held a vigil there, and she even rocked in distress over the body. So the scientists watching the kept close observation on Eleanor's body for seven days. And during those seven days, a parade of elephants came from five different families. Now, some were just curious, but others carried out behaviors that I really believe should be classified as grief. So what does grief look like? It can be rocking, as I said, in distress. It can also be social withdrawal, when an animal just takes himself or herself away from friends and stays by themselves, or a failure to eat or sleep properly, sometimes a depressed posture or vocalization. It can be very helpful for those of us studying this to be able to compare the behavior of a survivor before death and after death, because that increases the rigor of our interpretation. And I can explain this to you by talking about two ducks named Harper and Kohl. So we're into birds now. So Harper and Kohl were raised at a foie gras factory, and they were treated cruelly. Foie gras does involve force- feeding of birds. So this hurt their bodies, and their spirits were not in good shape, either. But thankfully, they were rescued by a farm sanctuary in upstate New York. And for four years, they stabilized, and they were fast friends. They often took themselves to a small pond on the property. Then, Kohl started to have really intractable pain in his legs, and it was clear to the sanctuary that he had to be euthanized humanely, and he was. But then the sanctuary workers did a brilliant thing, because they brought Harper to the body to see. And at first, Harper prodded the body of his friend, but then he laid himself over it, and he stayed there for over an hour with his friend. And in the weeks after, he had a hard time. He would go back to that same pond where he had been with Kohl, and he didn't want any other friends. And within two months, he died as well. Now, I'm happy to say that not all grieving animals have this sorrowful outcome. Last summer, I flew to Boston to visit my adult daughter, Sarah. I was with my husband Charlie. I really needed a break from work. But I succumbed, and I checked my work email. You know how that is. And there was a communication about a dejected donkey. Now, as an anthropologist, this wasn't what I expected, but there it was, and I'm glad I read it. Because a donkey named Lena had gone to another farm sanctuary, this one in Alberta, Canada, as the only donkey there, and had trouble making friends for that reason. But she eventually did make friends with an older horse named Jake, and for three years they were inseparable. But the reason the email came was that Jake, at age 32, the horse, had become gravely ill and had to be put down, and this is what was going on. This is Lena standing on Jake's grave. She didn't want to come in at night. She didn't want to come in for food. She didn't want to come in for water. She pawed at the grave, she brayed in distress, and there she stood. So we talked and we brainstormed. What do you do for an animal like this? And we talked about the role of time, of extra love and kindness from people and of urging her to make a new friend. And here's where her trajectory does diverge from that of Harper the duck, because she did make a new friend, and sanctuary workers wrote back and said it worked out well. Now sometimes, scientists supplement observation with hormonal analysis. There's an example of a group of scientists in Botswana, who took fecal material from baboons and compared two different groups. The first group were females who had witnessed a predator attack and lost someone in that attack, and the second group were females who had witnessed an attack but had not lost someone. And the stress hormones were way up in that first group. But here's the thing: the scientists didn't just call them "stressed baboons," they called them "bereaved baboons," and in part, that's because of the observations that they made. For example, this mother-daughter pair were very close, and then the daughter was killed by a lion. The mother removed herself from all her friends, from her grooming networks, and just stayed by herself for weeks — bereavement — and she then slowly recovered. So we have bereaved baboons. Will science tell us someday about bereaved bees? Will we hear about frogs who mourn? I don't think so, and I think the reason is because animals really need one-to-one, close relationships for that to happen. I also know that circumstance matters, and personality matters. I have documented cats and dogs who grieve, our companion animals, but I also interacted with a woman who was extremely bothered because her dog wasn't grieving. She said to me, "The first dog in the house has died. The second animal does not seem concerned, the second dog. What is wrong with him?" Do Animals Feel Grief? Cats, dogs, and other animals show evidence of grieving. THE BASICS. Understanding Grief Find a therapist to heal from grief. In an earlier blog post, I staged a debate between an advocate claiming that nonhuman animals have emotions and a skeptic arguing that there are simpler explanations of animal behavior. I did not declare a winner in the debate, because I was not swayed by either line of argument. However, a book by Barbara J. King from 2013 has convinced me that animals besides undergo grief, making it more plausible that they experienced many other emotions. What is the logic of inferring that an entity has a kind of mental process such as an ? It would be elegant if we could give a deductive argument using a general principle: If an animal has characteristic X, then it has emotion. But no such definitive criteria exist. Perhaps probability theory could be used to judge whether an animal has an emotion, in line with Bayes' theorem: P (emotion | evidence) = P (emotion) * P (evidence | emotion) / P (evidence) But the required probabilities are unknown. The appropriate logic for assigning emotions and other mental processes to animals and other entities is from inference to the best explanation. We need to determine whether attributing emotions to animals is the best explanation of their behavior, taking into account alternative explanations of the relevant evidence as well as deeper explanations of why animals feel emotions. These deeper explanations would use what is known about psychological and neural mechanisms to explain why animals grieve. Another contributor to the overall explanatory coherence of hypotheses that animals grieve is an analogy between the explanations used for well-established grief and animal grief. According to Marc Bekoff (2007), animals show universal signs of grief in responding to the death of a mate, family member, or friend. Like humans, grieving animals may withdraw and seek exclusion, sit motionlessly, lose interest in eating and sex, become obsessed with the dead individual, try to revive the individual, and remain with the carcass for days. These behaviors can all be explained by the hypothesis that the animals are grieving. King provides abundant examples of grief behavior in animals across many species, including cats, dogs, horses, rabbits, elephants, monkeys, , birds, , and whales. She also has examples of cross-species grief between pets and their owners, and even between a dog and an elephant. For simpler emotions, such as happiness and fear, there are alternative explanations of behavior, such as that a dog only seems happy because of a reward mechanism, or that a cat only seems afraid because of threat reactions. But grief behavior does not seem to be explainable by such simple mechanisms since it requires more complicated recognitions of attachment and loss. What are the psychological mechanisms underlying grief? King thinks that humans and other animals grieve when they have loved. Animals who feel love for another go out of their way to be near to and interact with the loved one for reasons that go beyond mere survival. When animals are no longer able to spend time together because of death or separation, the loving animal will visibly suffer and act in ways that convey sadness. The neural mechanisms for attachment and sadness are beginning to be understood. There is no single brain area for love or for sadness because all emotions require the interactions of numerous brain areas, such as the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and striatum. All mammals have the same brain areas that underlie human emotions, while birds have different structures that seem to generate similar emotions. Mammals and birds all have neural mechanisms for representation, binding, competition, appraisal, and perception of bodily changes that I argue are responsible for brains having emotions (Thagard, 2019). ISBN 13: 9780226436944. From the time of our earliest childhood encounters with animals, we casually ascribe familiar emotions to them. But scientists have long cautioned against such anthropomorphizing, arguing that it limits our ability to truly comprehend the lives of other creatures. Recently, however, things have begun to shift in the other direction, and anthropologist Barbara J. King is at the forefront of that movement, arguing strenuously that we can—and should —attend to animal emotions. With How Animals Grieve , she draws our attention to the specific case of grief, and relates story after story —from fieldsites, farms, homes, and more—of animals mourning lost companions, mates, or friends. King tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. A housecat loses her sister, from whom she's never before been parted, and spends weeks pacing the apartment, wailing plaintively. A baboon loses her daughter to a predator and sinks into grief. In each case, King uses her anthropological training to interpret and try to explain what we see—to help us understand this animal grief properly, as something neither the same as nor wholly different from the human experience of loss. The resulting book is both daring and down-to- earth, strikingly ambitious even as it’s careful to acknowledge the limits of our understanding. Through the moving stories she chronicles and analyzes so beautifully, King brings us closer to the animals with whom we share a planet, and helps us see our own experiences, attachments, and emotions as part of a larger web of life, death, love, and loss. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Barbara J. King is professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary. She is the author or editor of many books, including Being with Animals . She blogs regularly for National Public Radio and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement . "A beautifully written book that will appeal to animal lovers." ( Booklist ) “Barbara J. King has pulled together anecdotal and scientific data on grief and love in animals in her excellent book How Animals Grieve . With her engaging story telling she opens up our eyes to the possible inner lives of some surprising species. We expect big-brained chimpanzees and elephants to express their feelings, but her tales of rabbits, goats, birds, turtles and others force us to look again at the emotional content of animal lives.” (Cynthia Moss, author of Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Ele) “Poignant, thoughtful, and sometimes heartbreaking. King once again elevates the discussion of animal emotion. She tackles a tricky subject with a scientist's care and an animal lover's grace.” (Jennifer Holland, author of Unlikely Friendships) "I must admit that I was skeptical that an entire book could be written on the subject of animal grief, because the scientific literature in this area is so painfully thin. But Barbara King has succeeded beautifully. She has collected an incredible database of stories about various kinds of animals, and taken together they offer more than enough substance to sustain this book. It is as if she has created a mosaic for her reader. She has collected bits and pieces--individual stories about one animal or another--which by themselves might be little but trifles. But King pastes them together with masterful skill, and the result is a compelling picture of animal grief. We get the feeling that there are still a lot of blank spaces on the canvas, as our scientific understanding is far from complete, but it is only a matter of time before these spaces will begin to fill in. How Animals Grieve is a fascinating book which will interest and inform animal lovers and scientists alike." (Jessica Pierce, author of The Last Walk) "In this deeply moving and beautifully composed treatise that is sure to anger some, but inspire many, Barbara King methodically presents her powerful evidence that many animals possess thoughts, feelings and emotions, including the profound sense of loss following the death of a family member or close companion. Consider, for example, the female who carries her dead calf for several days, loath to part with her beloved child. What else is she doing but grieving? It might be a controversial, minority viewpoint that some animals mourn the death of others, but King's profound and well-documented work has left me firmly in her camp." (David Kirby, author of Death at Sea World) "Humans and other animals experience love and fear, and form deep emotional bonds with cherished companions. We mourn when a close friend dies, and so do other animals, as Barbara King's poignant book illustrates in compelling detail. How Animals Grieve helps us to connect and to better understand the complex social lives of other animals and of ourselves." (Gene Baur, president and cofounder of Farm Sanctuary) "Let me begin by saying I recommend this book to anyone who doubts that animals grieve. The evidence presented is overwhelming." ( EcoLit ) "How Animals Grieve is not the definitive work on animal grief, but rather a stepping-stone to further investigation, observation and understanding. King hopes others will continue to look with fresh eyes, expand our knowledge and better understand all animals." ( Shelf Awareness ) "Admirably, carefully, and cautiously reviews and synthesizes a topic that is of great interest to numerous people, including those who are fortunate enough to live with nonhuman companions, those who are lucky enough to study them, and those who are interested in other animals for a wide variety of reasons." (Marc Bekoff Psychology Today ) "King's thoughtful, warm-hearted prose will raise awareness and amaze readers." ( Publishers Weekly )