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It’s in your nature celebrates the dead a few days in advance. What do animals do in the face of death? Are they aware of it? Certain behaviors observed, in particular in elephants, show that the death of one of their own does not leave them indifferent.
It’s a myth. The Elephant Graveyard, a place where pachyderms meet to die, was born from the imagination of 19th century European explorers in Africa discovering piles of elephant skeletons. ” Gradually, we realized that these corpses no longer had any tusks, and we know today that the elephants were extremely hunted, recalls Emmanuelle Pouydebat, director of research at the National Museum of Natural History, in Paris. All these skeletons gathered in the same place were quite simply the fruit of a very strong hunt of which the elephants are victims. In Africa alone, there were more than 4 million pachyderms at the beginning of the 20th century, today there are more than 400,000. The cemetery of elephants is therefore indeed a legend. Unfortunately, because the story was pretty… »
But the relation to the death of the most imposing of terrestrial mammals remains particularly remarkable in the animal world. ” Elephants adopt quite impressive attitudes when they come across the corpse of one of their congenersdescribes Emmanuelle Pouydebat, author of several works devoted to animal behavior, the latest of which is published this week. Animal sexall tastes are in nature (Arthaud). These are behaviors that are rarely seen in the animal world. They’re going to sniff the corpse, they’re going to nudge it with their paws, they’re going to really explore it. In particular the tusks, which are specific to each individual, and which are used by elephants to recognize each other. Neither flower nor crown, but elephants have sometimes been observed covering a deceased person with leaves and branches.
Understand what happened
Among chimpanzees too, the death of one of their own arouses unusual reactions. ” They will tend to explore the body of the individual, make him move, raise an arm and see that he falls, as if trying to understand what happened. We have also seen chimpanzees grooming a fellow creature on its deathbed. A layer where no individual has come to sleep after.
No funeral rite either for the bees, but the funeral directors are at work: each time an individual dies, a worker is responsible for pushing his body outside. A sanitary measure. It’s the same story with ants, some species of which go so far as to bury their dead. Even indulge in cannibalism. This is what researchers discovered in a former Soviet bunker in Poland. Ants, fallen into it through an air duct, found themselves trapped there, while surviving for years, by the millions. Because they fed on their deceased congeners.
“We cannot speak of funeral rites”
Cases of necrophilia have even been observed in crows, a bird that western culture associates with death. Some individuals have been seen attempting to perform a sexual act on a corpse. More frequently, crows get into the habit of gathering around a dead congener. Is it a form of meditation? Rather, in reality, a way of identifying a danger.
It is indeed tempting to see in animals a mirror of the human species, but researchers, like Emmanuelle Pouydebat, want to avoid any anthropomorphism. ” For some individuals faced with the death of one of their own, and in some species, there seems to be a real questioning, an exploration to understand what happened. They are probably aware that a change has taken place. But do they have a consciousness of death? Hard to say. And speaking of funeral rites, I’m not sure… Death, mourning, remain a mystery.
Is it summer in France?
With August temperatures these days, it is the hottest October ever recorded in France: 3.3 to 3.5 degrees higher on average compared to normal, a difference even higher than that measured this summer. And now plants are blooming again; they actually believe they are in spring. We saw chestnut trees in bloom at the Bois de Vincennes in Paris, we harvested strawberries and tomatoes. In the south, cicadas have been heard singing, and vines are producing new leaves. An abnormality that could be paid for, even if scientists still lack perspective. The plants get tired for nothing, because the frosts will eventually come. And eventually, it would be less fruit, fewer seeds and fewer plants.