How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  Death has come suddenly to the Gombe community, and the apes’ responses emerge as part of a fast-moving situation. In the little area around Rix’s sprawled and lifeless body, a wild mix of behaviors is playing out. “Aggressive, submissive, and reassurance actions are performed,” Teleki writes, “at high frequency and intensity by nearly everyone present, with many swift shifts in demeanor.” Let’s look at the males Hugo and Godi as a way of sampling some of the individual variation—and mercurial mood shifts—in the chimpanzees.

  Hugo displays vigorously and, at one point, hurls several large stones toward the body, which do not hit Rix. Shortly thereafter, he stills himself (though his hair is still erected, a sign of arousal) and sits on a rock, where he’s joined by another male. Hugo gets up, stands right next to the body, and stares at it for several minutes. Next he resumes his high-energy display, running away from the corpse. Later, in the area around the body, he mates with a female. When, much later, the male Hugh walks away from the death site, other chimpanzees, including Hugo, follow, after one last intensive bout of peering at Rix.

  Godi, an adolescent, responds somewhat differently. He vocalizes more persistently than Hugo, uttering wraaah calls. Coming near the body, he stares at it while whimpering and uttering other vocalizations. To Teleki, he appears “extremely agitated, more so than any of the others.” Throughout the next hours, Godi attends closely to the body. At 11:45, close to the time the group moves off, Godi is the only chimpanzee still watching Rix.

  At first glance, it may seem that Hugo’s and Godi’s responses to Rix’s death differed only slightly. Both showed signs of arousal, and neither one—in fact, no chimpanzee at the scene—touched the body at any time during Teleki and Davis’s observations, toward the end of which the apes moved on. In this way, the Gombe chimpanzees, in their response to Rix’s death, differ quite a bit from the Tai chimpanzees, in their response to Tina’s death. At Tai, touch was an important element in the group’s reaction.

  Teleki makes a point of noting, though, Godi’s “exceptional performance” that morning. Godi acted unlike the other chimpanzees in three ways: his proximity to the body, his level of agitation, and the frequency of his wraaah calling. Wraaah calls are “high-pitched, repetitious, plaintive wails,” Teleki writes, “which can carry for a mile and more along the acoustic funnels of steep valleys, convey[ing] an intense emotional state which cannot be adequately communicated in words.” Even though he didn’t touch the body, Godi was emotionally affected by what had happened to Rix. Godi, notably, had often accompanied Rix in their daily travels.

  It could also be argued that Godi’s behavior derived from his heightened sensitivity to a kind of contagion that spread among the chimpanzees as they displayed, called, mated, and generally acted with high arousal around the body. Since wraaah calls are sometimes given when chimpanzees meet up with strange humans or with a Cape buffalo, or when two groups meet, as well as when dead baboons or chimpanzees are sighted, Godi’s use of them doesn’t really help us understand what he was feeling. Certainly we cannot make an airtight case that Godi or any of the other apes recognized Rix’s death for what it was. “It remains uncertain,” Teleki concludes, “whether any participant grasped the conceptual difference between life and death.”

  Yet insistent questions intrude, based on the cumulative weight of what is known about chimpanzees and death. Why wouldn’t a social partner of the deceased ape feel strong emotion at the sight of his confederate lying lifeless? Why wouldn’t a community made up of intensely social beings respond as a community when one of its own dies? The choreography of tight ties within families and between social allies is the ever-constant backdrop of events in chimpanzees’ lives. We cannot understand what a chimpanzee does apart from the social dynamics that surround him any more than we can grasp a person’s behavior by looking at him in isolation. And we have seen what happened when Tina died at Tai. Tina’s little brother, Tarzan, clearly felt some emotion, and he was allowed to express it precisely because the male Brutus, who took charge of which chimpanzees were allowed near the body, recognized Tarzan’s kinship status vis-à-vis Tina.

  Nudged by such extraordinary, all too rare observations of chimpanzee responses to death in the wild, zoo scientists are paying keen attention to deaths in captivity. At a Scottish safari park, when an old female chimpanzee fell ill, zoo staff anticipated her death and switched on the videocamera. At the park, two mother-offspring pairs lived together: Pansy, the dying female, whose age was estimated to be in the fifties, and her daughter Rosie, age twenty, plus Blossom, a female about Pansy’s age, and her son Chippy, age thirty. The apes were in their heated winter quarters when Pansy, who had been listless for some weeks, began to breathe in a labored manner. Pansy’s companions seemed aware that something was amiss; in the ten minutes before her death, they groomed or caressed her at what the observers judged to be a higher than usual rate. Right around the presumed moment of death, group members continued to be highly active. In the journal Current Biology, James Anderson and his colleagues wrote up what happened with admirable precision:

  16:24:21 Chippy crouches over Pansy’s head then appears to try to open her mouth. Rosie moves towards Pansy’s head.

  16:24:25 Blossom, Chippy and Rosie simultaneously turn toward Pansy’s head. Chippy and Rosie are crouched over Pansy’s head. Chippy pulls Blossom’s face down toward Pansy’s.

  16:24:36 Rosie moves from Pansy’s head toward her torso. Blossom moves away from Pansy. Chippy lifts and shakes Pansy’s left shoulder and arm.

  The chimpanzees continue to caress and groom Pansy. At 16:36:56, Chippy “jumps into the air, brings both hands down and pounds Pansy’s torso, then runs across and off the platform.” This startling behavior departs significantly from the male Hugo’s rock-throwing displays around Rix’s body in the wild; here, Chippy attacks Pansy directly. Yet at Tina’s body, some males also displayed aggressively around the corpse and even dragged it short distances. When the male Ulysse moved Tina’s body about two meters, it was Brutus who dragged it back to its original location.

  Chippy’s behavior, then, isn’t far outside the range of what male chimpanzees do in the wild when a death occurs. Was he expressing anger or upset? Was he trying to elicit some kind of response from his immobile cagemate? Both possibilities seemed plausible to Anderson and his coauthors.

  The behavior of Pansy’s companions remained atypical through the night and beyond. (Data of this sort are unlikely to come from observations made in the wild, because wild chimpanzees fairly soon move away from the corpse.) Pansy’s survivors slept fitfully. Her daughter, Rosie, stayed near her body. In contrast to the moments before her death, no one groomed Pansy’s body, although Chippy attacked her corpse three more times during the night.

  The next day, the survivors were “profoundly subdued.” In silence, they watched as zookeepers removed Pansy’s body. For the next five nights, none of the chimpanzees slept on the platform where Pansy had died, even though they had favored that spot in the past. Indeed, for weeks they remained quiet and ate less than usual. These signs of animal grief—the altered routine, the disturbed mood—are by now familiar.

  Observations like these matter not just for our understanding of apes but for apes’ lives themselves—that is, for the dignity with which we treat them even as we keep them captive. The growing data bank of primate responses to death is fomenting a revolution in how captive primates are treated when one of their group dies. As we saw at the Scottish park, apes may be offered a chance to spend time with a deceased companion, and to watch when later the body is taken away.

  At Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, the gorilla female Babs suffered from an incurable kidney disease and was euthanized at age thirty. The staff there organized what they called “a wake” for Babs’s companions. Gorillas from different generations were present, some of whom were visibly emotional. The Associated Press reported the event in this way:

  Babs’ 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the
first to approach the body, followed by Babs’ mother, Alpha, 43. Bana sat down, held Babs’ hand and stroked her mother’s stomach. Then she sat down and laid her head on Babs’ arm. . . . Bana rose up and moved to Babs’ other side, tucked her head under the other arm, and stroked Babs’ stomach.

  We recognize here the grief of a child confronted with the utterly still body of a loved parent. For the whole of Bana’s life, she had been near her mother. Her need for touch, to feel her mother in a literal sense, is notable: we primates are tactile creatures. Babs’s other cagemates approached her too. Nine-year-old Koola brought close her infant daughter, a baby who had received Babs’s affection during her young life.

  Ramar, a silverback male, age thirty-six, stayed away from Babs. Some gorilla males are aloof in this way; others are not. At Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, the gorilla female Bebe was euthanized to spare her the pain that accompanied the malignant masses in her body. Diane Fernandes, then curator of research at Franklin Park and now director of the Buffalo Zoo, remembers the response of her mate:

  We first let the male Bobby in with the body and he did try to revive her, touching her gently, vocalizing and even placing her favorite food (celery) in her hand. When he realized she was dead, he began to call in this soft hoot but then started to wail and bang on the bars. It was clearly a demonstration of immense grief and it was very sad to watch.

  Fernandes shows no hesitation in deploying cognitive and emotional terms for what Bobby experienced when Bebe died. She says that he realized the fact of her death. As opaque as Bobby’s thought processes must remain to us, the sequence of his behaviors supports this conclusion. The gift of Bebe’s favorite food was probably offered because Bobby thought, or hoped, that Bebe was alive, or because he wanted to somehow encourage her, to revive her with a sensory experience she loved. When this strategy failed to work, Bobby erupted into sadness.

  The Franklin Park Zoo allowed Bobby some time alone with Bebe’s body, and then three other gorillas were permitted to approach. These apes also, Fernandes recalls, touched Bebe’s body, “as if to rouse someone who was sleeping.” But unlike Bobby, they did not vocalize. Perhaps they didn’t make the cognitive leap that I suspect Bobby did, or perhaps they just expressed their grief differently.

  From the Franklin Park event emerge some questions that might guide future research: Do survivor apes routinely try to revive the dead one? Do those attempts then cease because, as apparently happened with Bobby, a cognitive leap is made and the fact of death is comprehended? Or do the survivors instead continue to search for the ape that has died? Do mourning behavior and searching behavior ever coexist in the same animal? And how do these variable behaviors play out across individuals with different relationships to the deceased?

  Having logged hundreds of hours observing, filming, and analyzing behavior in gorilla families, I am not surprised that zoo staff “believe in” gorilla grief even though many questions remain unanswered. As Pittsburgh Zoo keeper Roseann Giambro puts it, she knows in her heart, because of what she’s seen, that gorillas mourn. I understand this sentiment, and at the same time know it must become the basis for hypothesis-testing. Zoo staff could record not just the actions taken by the gorillas but the quality of the actions: the heaviness in the muscles of a grieving ape, the anxiety in the movements of an ape searching for another who is missing, the frantic or mournful tone in a call shared with the group (or of course, the absence of these attributes). Often overworked, zoo staff may be hard-pressed to supplement their daily responsibilities with the task of compiling a detailed timeline of gorillas’ responses to death and notes on the quality of those responses. Yet that’s the best way to find out if the gorilla Bobby’s two-stage reaction—first trying to revive the dead animal and then grieving—might be repeated elsewhere when captive apes die.

  At Pittsburgh, two deaths, eight years apart, are fixed in keeper Giambro’s mind. In 1997 a female called Becky died. The causes remain undetermined, but Becky was in her mid-forties, which represents a good life span for a gorilla. For weeks afterward, her closest companion, Mimbo, stared at the spot where she had died and refused to walk through that room. Tufani, a younger female, responded differently. In an anxious state, screaming and rushing around the enclosure, she searched for Becky. It seems likely to me that Mimbo, with the wisdom of age and experience, grasped that his friend was gone, as Bobby apparently did with Bebe. Tufani, by contrast, may have lacked such understanding because she was younger and death was newer to her. Alternatively, the two gorillas’ responses may point us once again to variation in mourning habits according to personality.

  The silverback male Mimbo also lived to his mid-forties. When he died of liver problems, his son Mrithi, age thirteen, pushed at the body with his hands and feet. The female Zakula, who had borne three offspring by Mimbo, also pushed at his body, as if urging Mimbo to rise, and she groomed him. The gorillas vocalized in a way that was unusual and that sounded “mournful” to Giambro. Eventually the gorillas went outdoors, and zoo staff removed Mimbo’s body. When the apes reentered their enclosure, they searched for the silverback. For a week, group members were significantly disrupted in their behaviors, including their eating patterns. Gradually, Mrithi was allowed by the females to assume a position of leadership, and the gorillas’ lives settled down.

  After Mimbo’s death, there was no clear shift—as I think probably happened with Bobby after Bebe’s death and with Mimbo himself after Becky’s death—from a sort of “search and rescue” mode to a mourning mode. Mimbo’s groupmates only gradually came to accept his absence, despite having viewed his body directly after he passed away.

  Even at this early stage, with so much more to discover about apes’ responses to death in captive situations, one big message comes through. An ape may die gradually, becoming weaker and weaker with illness or age. Or an ape may die suddenly—because his heart stops, or because of an unexpected outcome on the surgical table, or because loving human caretakers move quickly to end pain once death is inevitable. The survivors deserve a chance to sit with the body, and to touch the body if they so wish. The outcome of this process will differ according to the kinship status and personality of the one who has died, and almost certainly with the age and knowledge level of the survivors as well. But whatever the outcome, the offered opportunity is a kindness deserved by primates who form tight ties and mourn their losses.

  When Rix died in the Gombe woodlands, the chimpanzees’ response to his sudden stillness was observed with acute sensitivity by Geza Teleki and Ruth Davis. Soon after, Davis suffered her own fatal fall. I do not know Teleki personally, but I wonder if, back in 1968, when his own grief was fresh and terrible, he felt a connection with these apes he knew so well, who had recently confronted sudden death themselves? I believe that Teleki would find such a question respectful to the memory of his fiancée. We grieve as primates, and we have company.

  13

  ON BISON DEATH IN YELLOWSTONE AND OBITUARIES OF ANIMALS

  Paradoxes thrive in Yellowstone National Park, a wilderness area flung across vast tracts of Wyoming and bits of Montana and Idaho. At the park, I walk inside the caldera of the world’s most explosive volcano and marvel at its power. When the Yellowstone volcano erupts again, as geologists tell us it will (it’s already overdue), the ash will alter the earth so thoroughly that most living creatures won’t survive. Even now, the earth growls and spits at Yellowstone, its controlled power on display.

  At the same time, the park seethes with life: bison, bears, elk, moose, coyotes, wolves, and birds allow a visitor to see a dynamic ecosystem in action. In spring and summer, the valleys and uplands bound with infants. Those of the mammalian variety rush about on ungainly legs, then seek their mothers’ milk. The cute bison and elk babies photographed in one season stand a decent chance of becoming wolf or coyote meals in the next. No managed parkland or tame zoo, Yellowstone is a place of life-and-death struggle. On a smaller scale, this struggle plays out in our backyards
too—ask anyone with a domestic cat who returns home with “gifts” of half-consumed birds, moles, or frogs. The 2.2-million-acre scale of the place, though, and the glorious faunal diversity in it, make Yellowstone an incomparably intriguing place for any nature lover.

  Visitors’ senses kick into high alert at Yellowstone for another reason too: even aside from the volcano, it’s a dangerous place for our kind. Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park by Lee H. Whittlesey is an oddly mesmerizing chronicle of the many ways one can perish in a gorgeous setting. Dotting the Yellowstone landscape are pools of brilliant color, sapphire blue and sunshine yellow. In them live extremophiles, tiny microorganisms that thrive on intense heat and that may cause an extreme death for the unwary or the impulsive.

  In 1981 two twentysomething California men visited the park’s Fountain Paint Pot area. One of the men’s dogs leaped off the walking path into a 202-degree hot spring called the Celestine Pool. What began as a canine tragedy became a human one when one of the men, ignoring bystanders’ pleas, dived right into the near-boiling water. The man emerged without the dog. Already by that point, it was too late for either of them. The dog died inside the pool. The man staggered about, with eyes totally white (and blind). Another visitor tried to help by removing the man’s shoes, but the skin peeled off along with the shoes. Later, “near the spring,” Whittlesey reports, “rangers found two large pieces of skin shaped like human hands.” First taken to the clinic at Old Faithful, the man was soon transported to a hospital at Salt Lake City. He died there the following morning.

  At the end of the size range opposite the hot-spring extremophiles are the iconic National Park animals, the American bison. Some people, Whittlesey notes, see the buffalo less as a potentially dangerous animal than as a romantic symbol of a vanished American past. “Many visitors,” he writes, “want to approach it, to touch it, to somehow establish a close link with it, as if that might somehow connect them to their own frontier heritage.” Unfortunately, a close approach to a buffalo is most likely to connect a person with a piercing set of horns. The Park Service warns people about this reality via posted signs and distributed brochures, but romanticism sometimes trumps common sense. Yellowstone’s first recorded death-by-bison occurred on July 12, 1971. A thirty-year-old visitor from Washington state yearned to photograph a solitary bull lying in a meadow, and approached within twenty feet of the animal to do it. The bison charged, tossing the man more than twelve feet with a powerful flip of the horns, which tore apart the man’s abdomen and injured his liver. His death unfolded in front of his wife and children, even as the family had in its possession a red “danger” pamphlet warning of too-close encounters with the park’s wild animals. Nowadays, maybe a print brochure isn’t enough; a YouTube video of bison-tossed tourists, sent to visitors’ cellphones, might do the trick more effectively.