I read this book about hearing. And from there I wondered about hearing in animals for whom it is a primary sense, like sight is in humans. Which made put me in the position of needing to know how those animals which have been with us the longest are different, so I read this other book about what thirty thousand years can do. Go figure, domesticated animals are demonstrably different and I don’t mean different like a pampered pet dog and a semi-feral village dog. I mean the new facial muscles they developed, the gaze following, recognition of self and aid rendered to conspecifics. That made me worried about dogs.

And then I had to read this book about laboratory dogs. There are things that are done on a terrible scale which are worse than heartless. There is a culture to keep it in place. There are people who literally abduct dogs and sell them to labs for “important testing” where they are prized for being more docile and trusting than the less socialized purpose-bred beagles. Naturally, I needed to read about the opposite sort of thing, which was this book about rendering aid as well as can be done.

Of course this meant I needed to know about pet keeping and I read this book with a very Eurocentric high-society type view of it. There was a good deal in there about grief for pets passed on from primary sources. From that I was obligated to read this book about the perception of death for a pet. And now I’m stuck. This isn’t a dead end, I just don’t know the path.

There’s a good explanation in the book about death and the understanding of it in different animals. There’s a field of study, comparative thanatology, that deals with that. There’s a frequent representation that science is unwilling to bestow upon animals the highest level of understanding death. Primates and cetaceans carrying the dead. Virginia possums feigning death where it is argued that the possum doesn’t understand what they are doing as playacting death, but that predators do understand it as death. It’s a rabbit hole, but if possums know genetically how to play possum, why should we ascribe predators a higher understanding of death and not also biologically mandated behavior.

Anyway, where I’m stuck. Do we understand death completely? There’s no reasonable expectation that we understand death at the most objective level. Alien race number one comes along, or if you like a dog blessed with speech, and witness sobbing over a coffin. Do they think it odd because our accepted representation of death is that it’s permanent absolute? Do they think it clearly wrong that the dead can not interact or do work because they see something we don’t? It’s a thing and I don’t know where to take it. Certainly not panpsychism.

Maybe I’ll read about bears.