Main Playing Possum : How Animals Understand Death

Playing Possum : How Animals Understand Death

Name: Playing Possum : How Animals Understand Death
Rating: 5.0 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780691260761

Susana Monsó

5.0 / 5.0

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How animals conceive of death and dying—and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortality When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom. With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today's leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows [...]how there are more...

Request Code : ZLIB.IO18435344

Categories:

Year:

2022

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

Language:

English

ISBN 10:

0691260761

ISBN 13:

9780691260761