An edition of Playing Possum (2024)

Playing Possum

How Animals Understand Death

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Last edited by kaleidoscopedd
November 6, 2024 | History
An edition of Playing Possum (2024)

Playing Possum

How Animals Understand Death

  • 1 Want to read

How animals conceive of death and dying—and what it can teach us about our own relationships with mortality

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.

With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today’s leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.

Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

Publish Date
Language
English

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Edition Availability
Cover of: Playing Possum
Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death
2024, Princeton University Press
Hardcover in English
Cover of: Playing Possum
Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death
2024, Princeton University Press
in English

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Book Details


First Sentence

"In November 2009, National Geographic published a picture that would capture the imagination of readers and scientists alike."

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Mark Rowlands. xi
1. Introduction: The Silence of the Chimps
Page 1
2. The Ant Who Attended Her Own Funeral
Page 8
3. The Whale Who Carried Her Baby Across Half the World
Page 31
4. The Ape Who Played House with Corpse
Page 53
5. The Dog Who Mistook His Human for a Snack
Page 77
6. The Elephant Who Collected Ivory
Page 106
7. The Opossum Who Was Both Dead and Alive
Page 151
8. Conclusion: The Animal Who Brought Flowers to the Dead
Page 206
Acknowledgements for the Spanish Edition. 211
Acknowledgements for the English Edition. 213
Notes. 215
Image Credits. 235
Index. 237

Edition Notes

Translation Of
Zarigüeya de Schrödinger

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
591.5—dc23/eng/20240405
Library of Congress
QL785.M58613 2024

Contributors

Text Design
Haley Chung
Editorial
Rob Tempio
Editorial
Chloe Coy
Jacket Design
Haley Chung
Copy Editor
Karen Verde

The Physical Object

Format
Hardcover
Pagination
272
Weight
0.666

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL51119976M
ISBN 13
9780691260761
LCCN
2023057783

Source records

Better World Books record

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
November 6, 2024 Edited by kaleidoscopedd Edited without comment.
September 13, 2024 Edited by Star Squirrel Edited without comment.
February 17, 2024 Created by ImportBot import new book