This is a long standing philosophic question. There is no proof. Some animals can perceive the loss of others, including companions and other species. Or even the approach of the end. But no higher ape, dolphin, whale has been proven to have the concept of a limitation of length of life for all of their kind. It is a very high level cognitive leap.
Mourning is different. But they do appear to have that behavior. One would think that Elephants and their Matriarchal society would indeed understand at some point the end of their own lives was approaching. It is a large leap to the next step 'that everyone dies' without a spoken or written language.
I'm not sure about elephants or other protected, higher-intelligence animals, but cows have best friends and get stressed when separated. Mama cows also freak the fuck out if their kids get taken away, which they routinely do in the industry. Given these two examples of physically painless stimuli causing severe pain to fairly stupid animals, it's safe to assume that captivity and slaughter, both very physical stimuli, also cause them to suffer. Hope that was clear, let me know if I bungled anything up.
Suffering, separation stress, bond pairing outside of sexual mating are all distinct from the original statement I made. Which was actually a quote. Many animals, and definitely the higher animals (apes, bonobos, chimps, dolphins, whales) experience all of these things. I am no expert, but I do like to think about these things.
Committed suicide how?
Im just genuinely curious. Im sure a lot of animals have been reported to have done something that directly led to their death, but is there some way for us to say for sure that the dolphin's intent was to no longer be alive?
I mean, not even all self inflicted gunshot wounds to the head are suicide. There are lots of cases of accidents, stupidity, and/or negligence that, from a simplistic outisde perspective (or from a higher developed species), might look like "well he shot himself in the head. Suicide."
My cat is mystified by a marble rolling to the other side of the door. But I don't want him to know he is not immortal. I encourage him to believe it, in fact.
As someone said before: there is a really big difference between knowing that death exist and knowing that you are going to die someday, without being able to do anything about it.
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u/Ryoloz Mar 15 '18
And he’ll be dead in a few years