Do animals feel grief?
Photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla in Münster Zoo, holding the lifeless body of her three-month-old infant, are doing the rounds of the world’s media. The pictures have prompted headlines such as “Heartbreaking” and “A Mother’s Grief”. Gana certainly looks inconsolable at the loss of her child. But is she? Are we too quick to project human feelings onto animals, particularly our closest ape relatives? The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes believed that anything without a soul was merely a machine – an automaton. Only humans, he believed, have souls, so animals are no more capable of higher emotion than a clock. But, as anyone who has been watching Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series The Genius of Darwin will recall, evolution favours any species with strong enough parental instincts to see their young through infancy. Animals invest time, energy and genetic material into their young, just as we do, and they naturally want them to survive. Is it too much of a stretch
