Source: Wikipedia
Peccaries are pig-like animals of a smaller size. NewScientist (16 December 2017) reports on the pioneering work of a young scientist:
In January, 8-year-old Dante de Kort was watching a herd of five collared peccaries (Pecari tajacu) behind his house in Arizona. One of them seemed to be ill. The next day, he found a dead adult female and the rest of the herd nearby.
Dante was intrigued, and he had a school science fair coming up. So on the third day after the animal’s death, he approached the body – now up a hill from the house, where it had been moved because of the smell – and set up a camera trap. Whenever an animal approached the body, the motion-sensitive camera took a video.
Dante captured footage over the next two weeks and put his findings onto a poster. …
In the days after the peccary’s death, the other members of her herd visited her body repeatedly, usually alone or in pairs.
Sometimes they simply walked or stood near her. “Other activities included pushing at the dead individual, nuzzling it, smelling it, staring at it, biting it, and trying to pick it up by putting their snout under the corpse and pushing it up,” the authors write. Sometimes, the other peccaries slept next to the body or snuggled up against it.
“It is heartbreaking to observe two [peccaries] trying to pick up the dead one, as if they wanted to help it to get up,” says [Marianna Altrichter of Prescott College]. “The herd reacted in a way that resembles mourning and grieving.”
Contrast that with the Victorian age practice of vivisection on animals, typically dogs, without anesthesia. They were convinced the animals didn’t suffer pain, nor have other emotions. To my mind, the question of how much emotion other creatures experience is tied into where they fall on the tree of life, or, more explicitly, does their parentage happen to go back to a part of the tree that used emotions as a survival mechanism or not? For emotion is surely a survival mechanism, but not always for the individual – sometimes it benefits the group as a whole.
We have a personal example at our house. A little more than 14 years ago I acquired two kittens, littermates that became tightly bonded. When their stepmom died, they cried and looked for her, and when one of those two kittens died almost two years ago of cancer, the survivor cried and was morose for several months; even today he’ll go upstairs and yodel in what we believe is him calling for her.
We could go into the question of whether the grief has survival merit, or if it’s just the inevitable whiplash of the close-knit bond of two or more creatures. But I think that’s for another night.
Oh, and the 8-year old? He’s lead author on the paper derived from his work.
