I think this is an absurd level of reductionism. Social animals recognize one another as individuals. They remember past interactions with other individuals, sometimes over many years. They recognize others as belonging to their social group in contrast to others. They recognize members of the same species, even if they have never seen them before, and behave differently to them than even to members of closely related species. A baboon may not think “I am a baboon and these are other baboons,” but it certainly recognizes a commonality between itself and other baboons that is lacking for, say vervet monkeys in the same area.
Thank you for agreeing with the exact point that I was making.
If that’s the point you were trying to convey, you made it poorly.
I was thinking of toxic immobility or playing possum where an animal plays dead to possibly escape being attacked or eaten.
"Apparent death, colloquially known as playing dead, feigning death, or playing possum, is a behavior in which animals take on the appearance of being dead. This form of animal deception is an adaptive behavior also known as tonic immobility or thanatosis. Apparent death can be used as a defense mechanism or as a form of aggressive mimicry, and occurs in a wide range of animals.
When induced by humans, the state is sometimes colloquially known as animal hypnosis. According to Gilman et al.,[1] the investigation of “animal hypnosis” dates back to the year 1646 in a report by Athanasius Kircher.
Tonic immobility
Tonic immobility (TI) is a behaviour in which some animals become apparently temporarily paralysed and unresponsive to external stimuli. In most cases this occurs in response to an extreme threat such as being captured by a (perceived) predator. However, in sharks exhibiting the behaviour, some scientists relate it to mating, arguing that biting by the male immobilizes the female and thus facilitates mating.[2]
Despite appearances, the animal remains conscious throughout tonic immobility.[3] Evidence for this includes the occasional responsive movement, scanning of the environment and animals in TI often taking advantage of escape opportunities."
"For defense
For defensive purposes, thanatosis hinges on the pursuer’s becoming unresponsive to its victim, as most predators only catch live prey.[41]"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_death
A prime example may be a cat chasing a mouse. Sometimes the mouse instinctively stops dead (no pun intended) and the cat stops the chase and sometimes leaves. I’m sure there’s no “OMG, do I keep running for my life or stop and play dead?” thought process.
As for the snake eating the frog. There’s a animal documentary of a snaking eating a frog, possibly the one the OP saw, where the frog calmly allows itself to be chomped on because its body is covered with a toxic chemical that immobilizes and eventually kills the snake. The frog then walks out of the snake’s mouth.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
There is no concious choice to play dead–it is a form of fainting in terror. I’ve seen (and handled) a “dead-playing” possum. It wasn’t acting–it wasn’t concious.
There’s no reason to assume that it isn’t widespread.
Many creatures, including humans, behave exactly as if they recognize members of their own species as being different than members of other species; and recognize members of different other species as being different from each other; and recognize individuals, both of their own species and of other species; and expect different behavior from different individuals.
Why do you want so strongly to assume that the way in which humans do this is essentially different from the way in which members of all other species do this? Our ability to make such distinctions evolved. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Our muscles work in the same way as the muscles of other animals work. Why, when our brains allow us to do similar things, should we assume that they’re not working in similar ways to the ways the brains of other animals work?
That doesn’t mean we’re identical. If human children are raised in a household in which they hear humans talking and see humans reading books, the children learn to speak the local language and to read the books. No matter how much I talk to the cats or how many books they see me reading, they’re not going to start speaking English or get bored one day and start hunting through the seed catalogs for pictures of cats or mice or catnip, let alone read Subdivision and the Comprehensive Plan and take useful notes. They’re not humans; they’re cats. But they and I are both social creatures (yes, felis domesticus is a social species) and we can both tell a cat from a human, tell a human we know from one that we don’t, and remember that Individual A treated us well and that Individual B didn’t. Why should I assume that we’re somehow doing this by entirely and absolutely different methods?
But how do they know “when death is inevitable”? Can they even know such a thing? That gets us right back to the thrust of the OP.
The point you appeared to be trying to make was that a baboon doesn’t see any difference between another baboon and a moving branch. If that wasn’t it, I’m not really sure what you were on about.
Anecdote:
My cat’s know a kind of ‘fear’
They are over dramatic about it because, well, because they’re ‘Siamese cats’ and they come with that feature.
They had never seen the pest control guy before. As soon as he walked in the house they flew to the beams. The man even said, “cats usually like me”
A pair of high-strung Siamese cats reacting to everything from an extra box in the house to a big party of people roaming around and you’ll know they believe they’re gonna die.
And believe you, me, they’ll let you know in some very disturbing ways.
I think we’re on the same page as I said in my post above that the mouse doesn’t make a conscious decision a as human may, “Fight or flight, what to do?”. It’s almost pure instinct (I’m sure that must be some evolutionary trigger in action here).
I wasn’t convinced that I could die until I was well out of my teens. How many 20+ year-old frogs are out there?
Ahhh…that’s the beauty and agony of the OP’s question.
IMHO, to my having an understanding and belief, for any living creature to know what death is, especially their own inevitable demise, requires an understanding of self and knowing what being alive is.
As a child, when I’d go to a funeral and viewing the deceased, I was always told,
“They’re sleeping?”
“When will they get up?”
“They won’t” or “When they get to Heaven.”
“Oh…okay.”
No deep thoughts about why they wouldn’t be getting up or even concern that I’d never see them again. Just, they were old or the were sick. Oh well, I rarely saw them anyway. “SQUIRELL!” Run
It wasn’t until I was about 8-10 years old, did the realization that I would someday die too hit me. Prior to that, I knew to avoid potentially harmful actions, but “You could have been killed!” didn’t register as a real thing. I just figured I go to sleep (which I’ve always enjoyed, probably due to my lifelong depression) and never get up, which was a good thing.
[Comedy Funtime Hijack!]
*Nature abhors a vacuum. So does my cat. *
[/Comedy Funtime Hijack!]
Hey, I’m like seventy, and while I’m intellectually aware of my own death I can’t say I’ve successfully internalized it. Yeah, it’ll probably happen someday, but no one has told me when, so it may not happen at all.
But back to animals, I go to the aquarium, and there’s a big tank in the center with all these mixed species of fish in there and swimming around with all the rest is a 10 foot shark. And I know it’s well fed, and not “exhibiting feeding behavior” as the animal behaviorist would describe it, but if I were a flounder swimming along in that tank I’d be all “Jesus! That’s a fucking shark!” but the flounder just swims along like it’s as calm as can be. What’s up with that? Does it not recognize the shark as a threat?
A memory of my youth.
One New Years Eve, at our annual family gathering, we came across a toad and poked at it with a stick. Eventually turning it over and impaling, then pouring soda over it. When it finally stopped twitching, someone said; “Aw, buggah make, (die), die, dead and we all laughed”. At some level I knew we took the life of another living being, but it didn’t register that it wasn’t just sleeping forever. To this day, when I read or hear about some horrible torture and death of an animal or person, memories of “Ah, buggah make, die, dead” run through my mind.
I seriously doubt and seriously hope the the toad had no conscious stream of thought, “OMG, I"m going to die!” running through it’s pea sized brain!
More about the toad that just came back to me. I took the stick out of the toad as I felt bad for it.
No, what I saying is that a baboon may not assume concious motive to another baboon than to a moving branch. It knows that there are long green things with leaves that move back and forth sometimes. It knows that there are four-limbed hairy things that perform certain acts in certain circumstances. It even learns to distinguish finely between specific four-limbed hairy actors. But there is no reason to assume that the baboon knows that the four-limbed hairy things are acting out of motivation by a conciousness like it’s own and that the moving branch is not. There are built-in routines for facial recognition that help, and that trigger emotions, but they do not require concious thought. Stimulus-response does not require high-level abstraction. Some evolutionary lines may have it (at least some of the great apes, for example) but not all.
With the example of cats, I’ve been around them my whole life and haven’t noticed a particularly high level of conciousness or empathy. A mother cat will lie on it’s kitten unaware that the struggles mean that it is being smothered to death, then indifferently nurse the others by the corpse until it starts to smell and she moves the corpse or the nest. I’ve seen cats kill their whole litters this way, one kitten at a time with no sign of learning from it or even being aware that something bad was happening.
It’s possible they can tell a shark that’s in hunting mode from one that isn’t.
Don’t have time to hunt for the reference right now; but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen descriptions of herd animals reacting differently to a well-fed lion pride taking a nap in the area than they do to a hungry lion out hunting.
Again, where is the reason to assume that it’s not?
We don’t understand what a sense of self, let alone the idea that others may have it, is in humans. Why should we assume that this thing we don’t understand is limited to ourselves?
That is . . . really weird behavior. I’ve also been around cats (and dogs) my whole life and have never seen anything remotely like it. (I’ve seen a dog determinely put a dying pup out of the nest, but that’s not at all the same thing.) If it were common, I wouldn’t think there’d be any cats at all by now.
And I’ll add that while it’s also unusual behavior in humans, the equivalent behavior in humans does also happen. There’s a case in the news right now, of parents who let one of their kids freeze to death; they don’t appear to have cared, and apparently “indifferently” continued to deal with their other children while the one was dying.
So I don’t think that your experience with your cats is evidence that something entirely different is going on with cats and with humans.
Theory of mind? It would take some cognitive contortion to deprive them of this, wouldn’t it? Random example. Ravens exhibit it to some degree too, including an ability to plan for the future, ask others to cooperate on something far away, and also “lying” when it falsely buries food while being watched. These are behaviors that require some recognition of thought processes and empathy, in a way that would be indistinguishable from an actual theory of mind in another human… i.e. the kind of thing that if we saw in another person, without them communicating with us, we would not try to prescribe to pure “instinct”. Where in the brain does instinct stop and awareness begin, anyhow? You can’t even reliably measure that in humans.