Can animals sense that a threat is existential?

Factual Questions
1

I fell to pondering this when watching a whole bunch of videos of frogs being swallowed alive by snakes. The snakes generally grab them from the back and then slide them in bit by bit, incrementally. The frogs struggle a bit especially when their legs are still free, but otherwise just look impassive. I was wondering if the frogs have any notion of what is happening. Are they capable of appreciating that “this snake is in the process of eating me, and at the rate things are going in a short while I will be completely swallowed up”? Or does it just think “hey, I can’t move and have fangs in my back, and this whole thing is scary”?

Similar for other animals in similar circumstances.

Related earlier thread: Do animals understand the concept of death?

2

Having a face capable of showing emotion, and being actually emotionless, are two quite separate things and should not be confused.

3

As has been said, the fact that an animal “looks impassive” has nothing to do with its actual emotional state.

It’s pretty certain that something at the level of a frog has no concept of death, or even self. It is merely reacting to painful or frightening stimuli. It is probably equally scared in the mouth of a snake or in the hand of a pet owner who cares for it.

4

It’s hard for us humans to gauge the emotional or intellectual state of animals, especially ones that aren’t typically social/pack animals and/or don’t have primate faces and/or visible external signals like wagging tails.

I dunno if anyone’s ever tried to hook a frog up to a fMRI machine and fed it to a snake. We’ve studied rats and fear though, and their fear responses can be modified by training and/or environmental factors, such as the toxoplasma gondii parasite that makes them less afraid of cats. They also emit ultrasonic screams when they’re terrified.

Some birds, like juvenile ravens, will censure individuals they feel have wronged the group, and the punishment ranges in severity from feather-pecking to eye-gouging all the way up to premeditated gang murder, suggesting they understand a continuum of threats from minor to fatal. (This isn’t a situation where two individuals fight to the death by accident, but where a mob of ravens will collectively single out and murder an individual.) (cite: Mind of the Raven book)

At the other end of the spectrum, some plants also react when threatened by pests, releasing chemical signals that alter the taste of their leaves and also pheromone-like signals that alert its plant neighbors, who will also start producing similar defensive chemicals. Whether you would call that “fear” depends on how you define fear, I suppose – whether it requires some recognizable brain patterns or just reactions to threatening stimuli – and we are generally notoriously bad at accurately translating human emotions to other species. Heck, we can’t always even accurately predict and understand fear in other humans. What is existential for one person is an adrenaline rush for another.

5

The question isn’t about whether animals feel fear, however. I think it’s well established that many animals, especially vertebrates, experience emotions we can call fear. The question is whether animals can recognize that they are under threat of death.

6

Also, when you lobotomize humans in certain ways, their emotional capacities change, sometimes in ways that can be compensated by the remaining parts of the brain, and other times in ways that make their emotional states no longer recognizable by other humans – possibly eliminating certain emotional states while amplifying others. Evolutionarily, emotions are one of those things that are hard to trace back to the beginning stages because it’s not fossilized. We know the amygdala plays a large role, but it’s not clear yet what level of brain or neuron development is required for the earliest stages of what we would recognizably call fear.

This overview explores the effect of fucking with amygdala-like brain structures in animals that aren’t mammals, and suggests that there’s probably a similar evolutionary benefit for these “pre-emotions”, or whatever you want to call them.

My guess is that fear-like responses evolved earlier than the ability to socially express them, and for frogs, there’s no reason for them to have ever evolved the ability to express them to bored humans on some internet message board while they’re busy being eaten by a snake.

7

Well, the question is partially one of “do frogs feel fear”: probably. Can they distinguish between different levels of fear? Hard to say. But we can better measure gradients in rats and corvids, for example.

8

The OP appears to assume that frogs feel fear. The question is whether it understands it’s about to die.

9

It seems that lower level animals have a built in mechanism that turns off their system, going limp when death is inevitable, possibly an evolutionary trait that makes them a favorable choice for certain predators. When you get to primates, who from what I’ve seen will sometimes continue screaming and protesting to the end, it may be a call for help and a warning for others of the danger. In either case, I seriously doubt they have a sense of death, since that requires a sense of self awareness and being.

10

To add. Yes, primates and even cats and dogs do have a sense of awareness of death. At least to the extent of: “My baby/companion isn’t moving anymore. They’re gone!”. But I suspect it’s more an evolutionary trait of pack/social mentality. Strength and comfort in numbers (or in the case of cats who are generally solitary, a sense of companionship). But I seriously doubt there’s a sense of, “They’re gone and I"m going to be someday too.”

11

Cite?

12

There’s evidence that apes, whales, elephants, and crows and ravens may “mourn” in remaining with a dead member of their social group for a considerable time after death. However, that doesn’t mean they understand that they themselves can die.

13

Or that they themselves are alive. Or that anything else is alive.

14

I don’t know how we could tell.

I’m pretty sure that least some non-human animals – including IME at least some cats – do understand death in the sense that they know the difference between a live cat, even if ill or sleeping soundly, and a dead one. They don’t IME behave the same way around their friend’s body as they did around their friend.

Do they move from ‘my friend is dead’ to ‘and I might die too’? How would we know?

Do they move from ‘I might die too’, even if that’s a possible thought in their heads, to ‘I certainly will die sometime’? I’m inclined to doubt it – even an awful lot of humans have trouble with that one, and refuse in one way or another to recognize it. But again, how could we know?

Does an animal fighting for its life know that it’s in mortal danger, or is it only afraid of immediate pain? I don’t see how we can know that one either.

– Humans who have a lot of adrenaline going sometimes don’t realize they’re hurt, and don’t feel pain, until the danger’s over; sometimes even when they’re seriously injured. We can know this because people can report it. We also know, in the same fashion, that this doesn’t always happen; often, for whatever reason, this defense doesn’t kick in. Whether a non-human animal being eaten sometimes doesn’t feel pain due to a similar mechanism, again, I don’t think there’s any way of telling. But I wouldn’t assume that going limp means not feeling pain – it might, the creature might for instance have lost consciousness; but it might be a different sort of defense mechanism – the predator might assume the limp creature is dead or disabled and might drop it meaning to get a better grip or to eat it later, allowing a chance to get away.

– I’ve had several cats die at home, when it seemed likely they’d be less distressed than they would be by being taken to the vet. I’m remembering right now one in particular, who didn’t seem to be in any obvious distress on his last day – as long as I was in the room. If I left the room, he’d cry until I came back. When I came back into the room, he’d relax and lie quietly. He didn’t seem to want me to do anything – he didn’t want anything to eat or drink, he didn’t show signs of being cold or hot, he didn’t look like he was in pain, and he didn’t keep meowing at me as long as I was in his sight. He just wanted me to be there with him – and only on that last day; he hadn’t complained about being left alone in a room ordinarily, even the day before. He thought, clearly, that there was something going on, that particular day, that he didn’t want to be alone for. Did he know that he was dying? Again, how could we tell?

15

I had a dog that clearly seemed to believe she was facing her own possible death every time the vacuum cleaner went on.

16

I thought the question was whether or not the frog was contemplating the possibility that life lacked any real meaning?

17

Or that the cat has noticed that this part of it’s environment has stopped moving and is starting to smell like meat. Really, you can’t know if cats know that they are the same thing that they see when that they look at other cats or that they are just other objects that move around that they can interact with, like a branch blowing in the wind.

18

I think this is going too far. Animals need to know which other animals are members of their own species for breeding and social interactions. A cat at least recognizes members of its social group as individuals (recognizing that it may also recognize humans or other pets as members of its social group). (Of course, species recognition can go awry due to imprinting.)

19

Agreeing with Colibri. And a cat will react differently to a strange cat than to a strange dog; and many will react differently to a strange human than to either. Whether they recognize “species” in the same way as humans do is again difficult to tell; but they certainly recognize some sort of difference between some categories we call “species”.

They certainly don’t react to a branch blowing in the wind the same way as they react to any living animal.

It’s quite possible that they tell a living cat from a dead one at least partly by scent. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t tell a friend’s body from a random piece of meat. I’ve never seen a cat react to a dead cat in the same way as that same cat react/s/ed to a piece of meat I’m putting in the oven; or to a dead mouse or rabbit that another cat has just hunted.

I think it’s as much of an error to assume that nobody else is in any way like humans as it is to assume that everybody else is exactly like humans.

20

But there is no reason to believe that the instinct for “this is a moving object that I want to make leave” and “this is a moving object that I want to hump” are any more “self-identifying” than “this is a moving object that I want to bat around with my paws” or “this is a moving object that I want to eat.” The concept that “I am one of this” is both really high level abstraction and not necessary for interacting with the environment/surviving. You need to know that in situation A a moving object is likely to perform action B, you don’t need to philosophize more deeply on it than that. It is a level of cognition that isn’t evolutionary necessary. It cropped up in at least one weird evolutionary lineage, but there is no reason to assume that it is widespread.