8 ms·

Do Animals Know That They Will Die?

95 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

runningj 2y ago
i've raised some cats, i think the answer is yes.
- jorts 2y ago
  My cat recently passed away. I think she definitely knew she was done, at least for the last five days.
  - isoprophlex 2y ago
    Cats die weirdly. In my experience, they get sick and pretend nothing is wrong for as long as they can. Then, they suddenly crawl into some hiding spot and try to quietly give up the ghost. Or when they're very plainly chronically sick (eg. renal failure, where they'll vomit all over the place, all the time), they might just drop dead on the spot, but not before trying to pretend everything is just 'super a-ok fine, I'm not nearly dead, what do you mean my hind legs are barely functional', for years. Otoh we had a dog when I was a kid, and near the end you could just see the self-pity in its droopy eyes. 'No I will not go for a walk, can you see how miserable my existence has become? Woe is me.'
    - adriand 2y ago
      > Cats die weirdly. In my experience, they get sick and pretend nothing is wrong for as long as they can. This is a survival instinct. They are predators but they are also prey. “Acting” sick or weak is a good way to get picked off by predators. That’s also why they hide when they are gravely ill. They don’t have the luxury of lounging around like a lion.
    - bitwize 2y ago
      Cats have an instinct to find a place to hide, often far away, when near death. They live socially, and do this so that if a predator found the corpse it wouldn't jeopardize the rest of the colony. I keep hearing stories about cats who "ran away and never came back". When a cat of mine grew old, despite being deaf, blind, and quite possibly addled with feline dementia, she would get up on shaky paws and try to find a nice well-concealed corner to hide in while awaiting the reaper. We eventually had her put to sleep, but I think we might've waited too long.
  - giardini 2y ago
    Possibly my favorite cat died two years ago after an extended viral illness. It was terrible. He was a feral cat and so lived outdoors in the summer heat. I had found him on the sidewalk, pulling his body with his front legs (his rear legs had failed). I carried his drooping form to his favorite spot in the front yard under the shade of bushes. I put ice in a towel around him to cool him. Over the next two hours he lay there and cried to me as if to ask "Can't you do anything? What is happening to me?". I agree with you: they seem to know the end is near. I could only pet him gently and talk to him softly, which seemed to calm him. His cat companion was quite upset, stayed around, but did not approach too closely. After he died and rigor mortis set in, I retraced his path from where I found him back to our parking lot (a trail of bodily fluid remained). He had apparently been trying to eat something on the asphalt (I have seen this behavior before but don't know what it could be other than ingesting worms, bugs or plants, etc.) I carried his limp body to the front yard, dug him a suitable grave near a holly bush and lowered his body gently. His cat companion companion watched awhile but finally left, whereupon I lay the earth over one of the sweetest cats I've ever known.
    - tomcam 2y ago
      Ok that was poignant and beautiful and made me cry. It somewhat echoes the recent premature deaths of two of our chickens. Unfortunately and illogically, I was overwhelmed with emotion when they died.
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  we had to euthanize one of our cats last year. she was quite anxious and uncomfortable during the trip to the vet. when the actual moment arrived, she curled up on my wife's lap and started purring quite loudly -- even before the initial anaesthetic was injected. if you live with an animal for a while, you learn to read their emotions very well. i can't shake the conviction that she knew she was dying, that she maybe wasn't glad, but at least resigned to and accepting of her fate. this is a lot of anthropomorphism, i know, no doubt catalyzed by my own intense emotions around losing her. but intuitively i'd say "yes, they know".
  - ofrzeta 2y ago
    > you learn to read their emotions very well it might well be that they "read" your (wife's) emotions and did not think much about dying.
mrkramer 2y ago
They generally don't but they have instinct of survival(as all living beings) so they essentially want to live as long as they can. But mammals do have emotions and when they see their fellow buddy dead, they start to mourn. I remember watching documentary about monkeys and scientists put plastic monkey on the floor acting dead in front of group of monkeys and monkeys gathered together, hug each other and started crying, thinking the dead monkey was one of them. I think that was ephemeral emotion and thought but in that moment they knew that they can die too.
- kentrado 2y ago
  Maybe us, animals, don't have an instinct of survival. That's a bit of an assumption. Maybe we have another very strong instinct and survival is just the observed side effect but not the operating driving force. Indeed, animals take mortal risks constantly. It could also be that they we a variety of instincts in fight for domination and survival is just one of them but not the strongest one.
- soperj 2y ago
  I've seen a hawk take down a rabbit, it's buddy right next to him ran around in circles for a bit because it was worried, and then started eating grass again as the hawk was pulling out the entrails that it didn't want right next to it. Definitely no mourning.
  - mrkramer 2y ago
    I think that rabbit would be scared to death and run away for his life(instinct of survival) and not run in circles confused. Emotions probably get amplified in group and btw small rabbit can't do anything physically to large strong hawk. I again remember watching documentary when hyenas surrounded young lion and his older buddy came to help him and pushed off hyenas. So animal mammals defiantly have an emotional binding to the members of their specie, some more and some less.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Animals like rabbits are prey animals. The reproduce prodigiously as a species-survival mechanism. Individual deaths are common and while a predator is going to alarm them for a while, they will quickly get back to their primary business of eating and fucking. Mourning doesn't serve much of a purpose.
javiramos 2y ago
I once saw a group of ranchers butcher a cow in the plains of Paraguay. They had an area of the farm where the cows were slaughtered -- the area was a small patch of grass under a large tree. As the ranchers brought a cow near the tree and tied its tether to it, the cow started shaking and making strange sounds -- sounds you wouldn't expect from a cow. She knew she was about to be slaughtered. The shaking got worse and the cow eventually defecated and peed itself. As the rancher pulled out his knife, the cow started aggressively pulling on the tether and started howling. The cow knew it was going to die. That brief moment left quite an impression on me.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  That is just so sad, and makes me rethink my eating habits. Or at least who I purchase from. I do remember that people like this have studied animal behavior more closely and used it to make the design of slaughterhouses more humane. But interestingly she also observed that animals have the ability to hide pain: https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/temple-grandin-on-why-slaughterhouses-have-gotten-so-good/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/temple-grandin-on-why-slaug...
  - begueradj 2y ago
    Yes, actually all animals know to hide their pain. Why ? Because they have to. When a predator sees a group of possible preys, the first thing he does is to observe them to detect the weakest one. Hence the weakest animal has to hide his pain/sickness and pretend to be ok. In this context, when female mammals give birth, they automatically eat their placenta and lick the blood on the floor: to leave almost no traces that would give clues to predators that birth has taken place (to protect their offspring, in other words)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - catlikesshrimp 2y ago
      Placenta is also very nutritive.
mathgeek 2y ago
I am not sure whether I would be more surprised by the truth being “no other animal at any point in life understands they will die” or “some animals at some point understand they will die.” I would be pretty confident that not all animals do. Excluding humanity of course. My gut feeling is one or more species can understand.
- soperj 2y ago
  > Excluding humanity of course Only 14.4% of humans on earth [0] don't believe in some religion, meaning the majority feel that you don't actually die, but just go somewhere else. [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/374704/share-of-global-population-by-religion/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/374704/share-of-global-p...
  - quonn 2y ago
    And how many _actually_ believe it? They may try to believe or hope but their behavior suggests the majority of the believers are not so sure after all.
    - catlikesshrimp 2y ago
      The point stands: Many people don't understand death. They believe they are just going somewhere else. I remember that as a kid, another kid explained death to me. At that time I couldn't grasp the full meaning of ceasing to exist.
      - d0mine 2y ago
        where were you before the birth ? before the Big Bang? before the time itself? You go to the same place after the death--nothing new.
      - blackhawkC17 2y ago
        Literally everyone understands that they'll cease to exist one day, whether religious or non-religious. That some people hope there's something after this life doesn't mean they can't fathom a case where that isn't true.
aklemm 2y ago
During the harvesting of a pig, a farmer said to me that the pigs understand fear but do not understand death. Seemed pretty reasonable to me in how pigs reacted to their dead friends; they weren't much fazed.
- tiznow 2y ago
  I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that to a pig, a dead pig is just another meal.
  - wruza 2y ago
    It is possible that some of our now extinct sibling species also weren’t fazed that much by a dead fellow. It depends on default settings of a character and may be orthogonal to subj. The same stands for humans, some cultures celebrate the death.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Not really. Pigs will eat almost anything if they need to. But eating meat is one of the last things they'll eat before starving.
    - Amezarak 2y ago
      This is not my experience at all. And I’ve been quite shocked by what farmers I know have told me about how pigs treat injured brothers (eating them alive). And yea, they weren’t starving. I am basically an animal intelligence/emotional range maximalist but that doesn’t mean they respond the same way we do.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        Well, I can't speak to what conditions your pig farmer friends keep their pigs in, but none of the dozens of pigs I've ever raised had ever shown any kind of inclination towards cannibalism. Sows eating their own piglets is the closest I've heard in natural conditions, but there is probably some deeper evolutionary reason behind that and not just like "oh nice, an easy meal!"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cryptozeus 2y ago
Beautiful read! *Personal side story with death of a bird in my hand I must have been 10-12 years old, was playing on the street in front of my house. I noticed an injured bird was crying for help. I ran to it, lifted it in my hand to see what happened. It was clearly dying, I ran home and got some water. I gave it some water and it quickly drank as much as it could. While I was holding it in my hand, it looked at me with big round eyes and took its last breath. I could feel something leave its body and I felt it in my hand. I remember this often what it saw before dying, what was it thinking before dying.
sktrdie 2y ago
If out of all the species that ever existed, we're the only ones that understand our own mortality, it makes me wonder what else, by sheer probability, we have yet to understand.
- layer8 2y ago
  What “understanding” actually means, for one.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  > we're the only ones that understand our own mortality Do we really though? Yes, we understand it on some level - but I think if we really understood that we will die things would look very different. Basically every religion has some cope around this topic. A lot of Buddhists train for many years to 'understand' mortality, and even then I don't think all or even most of them truly grasp the impermanence of all things. The ones that do often find it a hard job to share their knowledge, even to the dedicated. *** Going slightly tangential: How much do some of us understand, that most people will never get? And what can we do about it? A few people have a real understanding of how con artists, sociopathic CEOs, serial killers, war-mongering and corrupt politicians, etc, think and operate - but they can never really explain it to most people, even in books. A lot of scams/lies work because most people would never think to be such an arsehole. And there are good reasons for that - it can be damaging to your well-being, your wallet, and your social sphere to be the type of 'paranoid' that sees those things as they are. And even experts get scammed; we all have blind spots, bad days, brain farts etc. Other examples: While nearly all people can 'feel' music, only a few can consistently bang out hit songs. Many people struggle with big numbers, and are therefore susceptible to all kinds of thinking errors. Others struggle with things like recognizing faces and remembering names, regardless of their kindness and empathy. For all the work done in psychology about things like blind spots, the Dunning-Kruger effect, disorders etc, we are still in a position where openly attacking education is a valid political strategy. So... I'm saying, we all have a lot to understand, and most of it will never be understood. I hope we can start organizing our culture to better accommodate this fact, but the resistance to any such change will be/is extreme.
skzv 2y ago
I slaughtered about 40 chickens once. I was probably around 19 at the time. My ex-girlfriend's dad just told me to get in the truck, asked his kids to stay at home, and took me to a chicken coop where him and his friend were raising chickens. I took them out of the coop, a few at a time, hung them upside down, and then killed them with a knife. After the first few, the rest in the coop began panicking even though they couldn't see what was going on. That really stood out to me. I'm sure they could hear or smell death. They knew what was coming.
chipweinberger 2y ago
The first animal with infinite lifespan could happen at any moment.
- lkuty 2y ago
  According to some, it already did. It is called the Universe.
mass_and_energy 2y ago
https://archive.ph/IyLgw https://archive.ph/IyLgw
richbell 2y ago
The Onion: Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k
FractalHQ 2y ago
The answer was no, probably not. Beautiful story!
tomcam 2y ago
When I was a young man the family dog developed some kind of huge cyst or tumor or something. My father, aunt, and cousin had died recently, which I suppose is why the dog didn’t get taken to the vet. Could simply have been bad finances. The dog was leaking body fluids. I put a trash bag on the floor of the car and drove him to a place neither of us had ever been, the Humane Society. About a mile away he started to scream and shake. It was a human-sounding scream. It didn’t stop when we arrived. He tried weakly to bite me as I extracted him from the back seat, and didn’t stop screaming when I left.

95 points by XzetaU8 2y ago

runningj 2y ago

i've raised some cats, i think the answer is yes.

jorts 2y ago
My cat recently passed away. I think she definitely knew she was done, at least for the last five days.
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  Cats die weirdly. In my experience, they get sick and pretend nothing is wrong for as long as they can. Then, they suddenly crawl into some hiding spot and try to quietly give up the ghost. Or when they're very plainly chronically sick (eg. renal failure, where they'll vomit all over the place, all the time), they might just drop dead on the spot, but not before trying to pretend everything is just 'super a-ok fine, I'm not nearly dead, what do you mean my hind legs are barely functional', for years. Otoh we had a dog when I was a kid, and near the end you could just see the self-pity in its droopy eyes. 'No I will not go for a walk, can you see how miserable my existence has become? Woe is me.'
  - adriand 2y ago
    > Cats die weirdly. In my experience, they get sick and pretend nothing is wrong for as long as they can. This is a survival instinct. They are predators but they are also prey. “Acting” sick or weak is a good way to get picked off by predators. That’s also why they hide when they are gravely ill. They don’t have the luxury of lounging around like a lion.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Cats have an instinct to find a place to hide, often far away, when near death. They live socially, and do this so that if a predator found the corpse it wouldn't jeopardize the rest of the colony. I keep hearing stories about cats who "ran away and never came back". When a cat of mine grew old, despite being deaf, blind, and quite possibly addled with feline dementia, she would get up on shaky paws and try to find a nice well-concealed corner to hide in while awaiting the reaper. We eventually had her put to sleep, but I think we might've waited too long.
- giardini 2y ago
  Possibly my favorite cat died two years ago after an extended viral illness. It was terrible. He was a feral cat and so lived outdoors in the summer heat. I had found him on the sidewalk, pulling his body with his front legs (his rear legs had failed). I carried his drooping form to his favorite spot in the front yard under the shade of bushes. I put ice in a towel around him to cool him. Over the next two hours he lay there and cried to me as if to ask "Can't you do anything? What is happening to me?". I agree with you: they seem to know the end is near. I could only pet him gently and talk to him softly, which seemed to calm him. His cat companion was quite upset, stayed around, but did not approach too closely. After he died and rigor mortis set in, I retraced his path from where I found him back to our parking lot (a trail of bodily fluid remained). He had apparently been trying to eat something on the asphalt (I have seen this behavior before but don't know what it could be other than ingesting worms, bugs or plants, etc.) I carried his limp body to the front yard, dug him a suitable grave near a holly bush and lowered his body gently. His cat companion companion watched awhile but finally left, whereupon I lay the earth over one of the sweetest cats I've ever known.
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Ok that was poignant and beautiful and made me cry. It somewhat echoes the recent premature deaths of two of our chickens. Unfortunately and illogically, I was overwhelmed with emotion when they died.
isoprophlex 2y ago
we had to euthanize one of our cats last year. she was quite anxious and uncomfortable during the trip to the vet. when the actual moment arrived, she curled up on my wife's lap and started purring quite loudly -- even before the initial anaesthetic was injected. if you live with an animal for a while, you learn to read their emotions very well. i can't shake the conviction that she knew she was dying, that she maybe wasn't glad, but at least resigned to and accepting of her fate. this is a lot of anthropomorphism, i know, no doubt catalyzed by my own intense emotions around losing her. but intuitively i'd say "yes, they know".
- ofrzeta 2y ago
  > you learn to read their emotions very well it might well be that they "read" your (wife's) emotions and did not think much about dying.

mrkramer 2y ago

They generally don't but they have instinct of survival(as all living beings) so they essentially want to live as long as they can. But mammals do have emotions and when they see their fellow buddy dead, they start to mourn. I remember watching documentary about monkeys and scientists put plastic monkey on the floor acting dead in front of group of monkeys and monkeys gathered together, hug each other and started crying, thinking the dead monkey was one of them. I think that was ephemeral emotion and thought but in that moment they knew that they can die too.

kentrado 2y ago
Maybe us, animals, don't have an instinct of survival. That's a bit of an assumption. Maybe we have another very strong instinct and survival is just the observed side effect but not the operating driving force. Indeed, animals take mortal risks constantly. It could also be that they we a variety of instincts in fight for domination and survival is just one of them but not the strongest one.
soperj 2y ago
I've seen a hawk take down a rabbit, it's buddy right next to him ran around in circles for a bit because it was worried, and then started eating grass again as the hawk was pulling out the entrails that it didn't want right next to it. Definitely no mourning.
- mrkramer 2y ago
  I think that rabbit would be scared to death and run away for his life(instinct of survival) and not run in circles confused. Emotions probably get amplified in group and btw small rabbit can't do anything physically to large strong hawk. I again remember watching documentary when hyenas surrounded young lion and his older buddy came to help him and pushed off hyenas. So animal mammals defiantly have an emotional binding to the members of their specie, some more and some less.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Animals like rabbits are prey animals. The reproduce prodigiously as a species-survival mechanism. Individual deaths are common and while a predator is going to alarm them for a while, they will quickly get back to their primary business of eating and fucking. Mourning doesn't serve much of a purpose.

javiramos 2y ago

I once saw a group of ranchers butcher a cow in the plains of Paraguay. They had an area of the farm where the cows were slaughtered -- the area was a small patch of grass under a large tree. As the ranchers brought a cow near the tree and tied its tether to it, the cow started shaking and making strange sounds -- sounds you wouldn't expect from a cow. She knew she was about to be slaughtered. The shaking got worse and the cow eventually defecated and peed itself. As the rancher pulled out his knife, the cow started aggressively pulling on the tether and started howling. The cow knew it was going to die. That brief moment left quite an impression on me.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
That is just so sad, and makes me rethink my eating habits. Or at least who I purchase from. I do remember that people like this have studied animal behavior more closely and used it to make the design of slaughterhouses more humane. But interestingly she also observed that animals have the ability to hide pain: https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/temple-grandin-on-why-slaughterhouses-have-gotten-so-good/ https://www.cpr.org/show-segment/temple-grandin-on-why-slaug...
- begueradj 2y ago
  Yes, actually all animals know to hide their pain. Why ? Because they have to. When a predator sees a group of possible preys, the first thing he does is to observe them to detect the weakest one. Hence the weakest animal has to hide his pain/sickness and pretend to be ok. In this context, when female mammals give birth, they automatically eat their placenta and lick the blood on the floor: to leave almost no traces that would give clues to predators that birth has taken place (to protect their offspring, in other words)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - catlikesshrimp 2y ago
    Placenta is also very nutritive.

mathgeek 2y ago

I am not sure whether I would be more surprised by the truth being “no other animal at any point in life understands they will die” or “some animals at some point understand they will die.” I would be pretty confident that not all animals do. Excluding humanity of course. My gut feeling is one or more species can understand.

soperj 2y ago
> Excluding humanity of course Only 14.4% of humans on earth [0] don't believe in some religion, meaning the majority feel that you don't actually die, but just go somewhere else. [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/374704/share-of-global-population-by-religion/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/374704/share-of-global-p...
- quonn 2y ago
  And how many _actually_ believe it? They may try to believe or hope but their behavior suggests the majority of the believers are not so sure after all.
  - catlikesshrimp 2y ago
    The point stands: Many people don't understand death. They believe they are just going somewhere else. I remember that as a kid, another kid explained death to me. At that time I couldn't grasp the full meaning of ceasing to exist.
    - d0mine 2y ago
      where were you before the birth ? before the Big Bang? before the time itself? You go to the same place after the death--nothing new.
    - blackhawkC17 2y ago
      Literally everyone understands that they'll cease to exist one day, whether religious or non-religious. That some people hope there's something after this life doesn't mean they can't fathom a case where that isn't true.

aklemm 2y ago

During the harvesting of a pig, a farmer said to me that the pigs understand fear but do not understand death. Seemed pretty reasonable to me in how pigs reacted to their dead friends; they weren't much fazed.

tiznow 2y ago
I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that to a pig, a dead pig is just another meal.
- wruza 2y ago
  It is possible that some of our now extinct sibling species also weren’t fazed that much by a dead fellow. It depends on default settings of a character and may be orthogonal to subj. The same stands for humans, some cultures celebrate the death.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Not really. Pigs will eat almost anything if they need to. But eating meat is one of the last things they'll eat before starving.
  - Amezarak 2y ago
    This is not my experience at all. And I’ve been quite shocked by what farmers I know have told me about how pigs treat injured brothers (eating them alive). And yea, they weren’t starving. I am basically an animal intelligence/emotional range maximalist but that doesn’t mean they respond the same way we do.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Well, I can't speak to what conditions your pig farmer friends keep their pigs in, but none of the dozens of pigs I've ever raised had ever shown any kind of inclination towards cannibalism. Sows eating their own piglets is the closest I've heard in natural conditions, but there is probably some deeper evolutionary reason behind that and not just like "oh nice, an easy meal!"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cryptozeus 2y ago

Beautiful read! *Personal side story with death of a bird in my hand I must have been 10-12 years old, was playing on the street in front of my house. I noticed an injured bird was crying for help. I ran to it, lifted it in my hand to see what happened. It was clearly dying, I ran home and got some water. I gave it some water and it quickly drank as much as it could. While I was holding it in my hand, it looked at me with big round eyes and took its last breath. I could feel something leave its body and I felt it in my hand. I remember this often what it saw before dying, what was it thinking before dying.

sktrdie 2y ago

If out of all the species that ever existed, we're the only ones that understand our own mortality, it makes me wonder what else, by sheer probability, we have yet to understand.

layer8 2y ago
What “understanding” actually means, for one.
mandmandam 2y ago
> we're the only ones that understand our own mortality Do we really though? Yes, we understand it on some level - but I think if we really understood that we will die things would look very different. Basically every religion has some cope around this topic. A lot of Buddhists train for many years to 'understand' mortality, and even then I don't think all or even most of them truly grasp the impermanence of all things. The ones that do often find it a hard job to share their knowledge, even to the dedicated. *** Going slightly tangential: How much do some of us understand, that most people will never get? And what can we do about it? A few people have a real understanding of how con artists, sociopathic CEOs, serial killers, war-mongering and corrupt politicians, etc, think and operate - but they can never really explain it to most people, even in books. A lot of scams/lies work because most people would never think to be such an arsehole. And there are good reasons for that - it can be damaging to your well-being, your wallet, and your social sphere to be the type of 'paranoid' that sees those things as they are. And even experts get scammed; we all have blind spots, bad days, brain farts etc. Other examples: While nearly all people can 'feel' music, only a few can consistently bang out hit songs. Many people struggle with big numbers, and are therefore susceptible to all kinds of thinking errors. Others struggle with things like recognizing faces and remembering names, regardless of their kindness and empathy. For all the work done in psychology about things like blind spots, the Dunning-Kruger effect, disorders etc, we are still in a position where openly attacking education is a valid political strategy. So... I'm saying, we all have a lot to understand, and most of it will never be understood. I hope we can start organizing our culture to better accommodate this fact, but the resistance to any such change will be/is extreme.

skzv 2y ago

I slaughtered about 40 chickens once. I was probably around 19 at the time. My ex-girlfriend's dad just told me to get in the truck, asked his kids to stay at home, and took me to a chicken coop where him and his friend were raising chickens. I took them out of the coop, a few at a time, hung them upside down, and then killed them with a knife. After the first few, the rest in the coop began panicking even though they couldn't see what was going on. That really stood out to me. I'm sure they could hear or smell death. They knew what was coming.

chipweinberger 2y ago

The first animal with infinite lifespan could happen at any moment.

lkuty 2y ago
According to some, it already did. It is called the Universe.

mass_and_energy 2y ago

https://archive.ph/IyLgw https://archive.ph/IyLgw

richbell 2y ago

The Onion: Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJkWS4t4l0k

FractalHQ 2y ago

The answer was no, probably not. Beautiful story!

tomcam 2y ago

When I was a young man the family dog developed some kind of huge cyst or tumor or something. My father, aunt, and cousin had died recently, which I suppose is why the dog didn’t get taken to the vet. Could simply have been bad finances. The dog was leaking body fluids. I put a trash bag on the floor of the car and drove him to a place neither of us had ever been, the Humane Society. About a mile away he started to scream and shake. It was a human-sounding scream. It didn’t stop when we arrived. He tried weakly to bite me as I extracted him from the back seat, and didn’t stop screaming when I left.