ANIMALS GRIEVING

In 55 b.c.e. the Roman leader Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants. Surrounded in the arena, the animals perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, they then “entreated the crowd, trying to win their compassion with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation.” The audience, moved to pity and anger by their plight, rose to curse Pompey – feeling, writes Cicero, that the elephants had a relation of commonality (societas) with the human race.

Flo, a female chimpanzee, died of old age by the side of a stream. Flint, her son, stayed near her corpse, grabbing one of her arms and trying to pull her up by the hand. He slept near her body all night, and in the morning he showed signs of depression. In the days following, no matter where he wandered off, he always returned to his mother's body, trying to remove the maggots from it. Finally, attacked by the maggots himself, he stopped coming back, but he stayed fifty yards away and would not move. In ten days he lost about a third of his body weight. Finally, after his mother's corpse had been removed for burial, he sat down on a rock near where she had lain down, and died. The post mortem showed no cause of death. Primatologist Jane Good-all concludes that the major cause of death had to be grief.