ollow the same patterns of change. This can allow the animals to learn about the irreversible nature of death, insofar as once these signals appear, the individual never again shows signs of life. Thanatologists not only tend to pay little attention to the multi-modality and functionality of death, they are also, as we saw in the previous section, fixated on intra-specific relations and affiliative or otherwise noteworthy behaviours towards corpses. But death is everywhere in nature. Animals typically share their environment with many other species, with regards to whom they will likely also have formed implicit expectations of how they behave. In addition, mortality rates are very high in the wild. It is generally difficult for an animal to make it to maturity, given the high prevalence of infant mortality, even among long-living animals with slow developments [e.g. half of Mahale chimpanzees die before weaning (Nishida et al. 2003 ); cub mortality amongst lions may be as high as 67% (Schaller 1976 )]. But even animals who reach adulthood face a constant threat of death, due to the high occurrence of predation, disease, parasitism, accidents, natural disasters, lack of resources, intra-specific violence, and human-related causes. Thus, animals will encounter death in many different forms throughout their lives. Many, or perhaps most, of these deaths will occur in animals of other species towards which the witnessing individuals have no emotional attachment, but still the number of deaths witnessed (= high experience) could compensate the relative lack of interest (= low emotion ). Thus, they could contribute to the animals’ development of a CoD, even if they might not generate any ‘noteworthy’ behavioural responses other than simply ignoring the corpse. The focus on affiliative behaviours and the search for grief has also led to the disregard of deaths that are the result of purposeful killing. This is unfortunate, given that they potentially represent a fertile gr

Death is common, so is understanding it: the concept of death in other species | Synthese | Springer Nature Link # Death is common, so is understanding it: the concept of death in other species - Open access - Published: 29 September 2020 - Volume 199, pages 2251–2275 (2021) - Cite this article You have full access to this open access article ## Abstract Comparative thanatologists study the responses to the dead and the dying in nonhuman animals. Despite the wide variety of thanatological behaviours that have been documented in several different species, comparative thanatologists assume that the concept of death (CoD) is very difficult to acquire and will be a rare cognitive feat once we move past the human species. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is based on two forms of anthropocentrism: (1) an intellectual anthropocentrism, which leads to an over-intellectualisation of the CoD, and (2) an emotional anthropocentrism, which yields an excessive focus on grief as a reaction to death. Contrary to what these two forms of anthropocentrism suggest, we argue that the CoD requires relatively little cognitive complexity and that it can emerge independently from mourning