[Animals] Do Animals Commit Suicide?

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Those who argue for the possibility of animal suicide — most are quick to note that they are not certain it happens — call this “anthropo-denial.” That is, they think prima facie dismissal of the possibility that animals might think and act in ways perceived as uniquely human is too hasty. They maintain instead that these capabilities ought to be viewed on a spectrum. While animal grief — or depression or joy or anger — might not manifest in the same ways it does in humans doesn't mean it isn't real. So it is with suicide, they insist.

“We need to learn to sit with that: not knowing for sure either way and adopting a position of what I call epistemic humility. We need to be open to the possibility that we cannot rule it out,” says David Peña-Guzman, a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and author of a 2017 paper on the subject. The article, published in the journal Animal Sentience, was accompanied by a variety of responses from other experts in the field, who completely objected to and supported his claims. Peña-Guzman authored a follow up that addressed his critics in 2018.

“The funny thing was the critics realizing that they actually disagreed with each other,” he recalls. Indeed, the question is profoundly complex and affirmative evidence rests mainly on singular observations and inference rather than empirical evidence. Interpretations vary accordingly. Jane Goodall memorably recounted the death of one of her chimpanzee subjects, Flint, who seemingly lost the will to live and died a month after the death of his mother Flo in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Similar instances have been noted in dogs and elephants. These are startling observations to be sure, but are they suicide in the sense we would use it to describe a human death? Even in cases in which the victim is under extreme duress or mentally unstable, we typically think of suicide as having some element of intent. We can't prove that Flint intentionally starved himself — it's simply unknowable.

“I think it's sort of like a dark matter,” says one of the respondents to Peña-Guzman's paper, Ryan Hediger, who researches animal studies and teaches English at Kent State University. “There are behaviors out there that we just haven't seen enough to really be able to interpret.”

Some self-destructive behaviors in the animal kingdom, it's worth noting, are almost certainly not suicide in any meaningful sense of the word. Ants and aphids will explode when approached by predators, benefiting their conspecifics. And some bee species abandon their nests when parasitized by flies in order to protect their colony. Though research on invertebrate sentience has indicated that insects might be able to feel pain, for instance, these behaviors are almost certainly instinctive and not motivated by individual decision making. So, too, the apparent suicides of lemmings who throw themselves from cliffs are more likely an accidental consequence of overpo[CENSORED]tion than a conscious leap into the abyss.

Intentional or Otherwise

Others are far more ambiguous. Famed field biologist George Schaller recounts an instance where a water buffalo, maimed by lions, had escaped and returned to its herd. Then, inexplicably, it left the safety of its group and allowed the lions to finish the job. Did it intentionally allow its predators to end its life, knowing that it could not survive the injuries they had inflicted? Or was it motivated by something else entirely — delirium or a desire to draw predators away from its group?

Another case cited in the animal suicide literature is equally subjective in its interpretation. In her 2013 book How Animals Grieve, Barbara King relates the story of a mother bear who, along with her cub, was subjected to the brutal practice of bile milking. In this procedure, which is largely carried out in Asian countries, catheters are inserted into bears in order to extract bile — traditionally believed to have medicinal properties. The mother bear supposedly broke free of her restraints, smothered her cub, and then smashed herself into a wall, ending her own life. That this animal intentionally killed her offspring and then herself in order to escape a miserable existence does not seem terribly plausible. More likely, she panicked or had been driven to a frenzied state due to the torturous conditions she had been subjected to.

Cases like these illustrate the major challenges in assessing the possibility of animal suicide. An animal would have to have a sense of self, an understanding of what death actually means, and the ability to execute a series of actions that he knew would lead to his own death. There is some indication of the former two capacities, but the latter is indiscernible. The fact that dolphins and some primates appear to engage in mourning for their dead is probably not sufficient to indicate that they actually understand and are able to facilitate their own mortality.

Even assuming that observers like O'Barry