Animal Grief: Another Understanding of Death

Cult of death has long been one of mankind’s cornerstone in terms of acknowledgement of the abstract, understanding of the universe and the sacred. Rituals of the last rites to honour death and most commonly celebrate a person’s life.

Research in ethology (a branch of zoology studying animal behaviour) has focused in recent years on the way animals mourn their own. While the outcome showed animals do not care for deaths in animals of other species except in some specific cases, such as death of an individual of another species replacing a child, theories are still ongoing as to how animals treat death, a scientific discipline known as thanatology.