Why do animals never commit suicide ?
Animals suffer, like every other being, here is my hypothesis of why they still don't commit suicide
I recently saw a movie about a wolf that had lost its pack. It wandered by itself for weeks. It stopped eating well in sadness. Its posture changed. By most standards, this wolf seemed to be grieving.
But I found something unusual. It continued to drink water. It did not walk off a cliff. I was so heartbroken looking at it. I thought to myself that if that were to happen to me, what happened to the wolf, it would shatter me to the point that I would not know how to live anymore.
I began to think: why don’t animals commit suicide?
Animals suffer. We know that. Animals have pain. Animals have fear. Animals have grief.
Elephants visit the remains of their family members.
Dogs stop eating when their master dies. (mine stops even if I am gone for just 2 hrs)
Some animals display the signs of depression and sorrow. Suffering is not exclusively human. Animals have suffered for millions of years before we did. But suicide appears to be a uniquely human experience.
Even when animals are in extreme suffering, they do not have the urge to kill themselves.
What do they know that we don’t? Or what do we know that they don’t, and is it a gift or a curse?
What causes us despair? It’s not just suffering. Animals show us that. They suffer just as we do, but they don’t kill themselves. What causes human despair is suffering plus the idea that it might never change. Suffering plus the idea that it’s permanent, that it’s justified, that it’s meaningless.
That’s the human combination. That’s what’s unique to us. That’s what requires time. That requires us to imagine the present minute stretching out into a long future. Animals can’t do that. They can’t imagine the future. They can only imagine the present. They’re stuck in the present. That may be a kind of freedom.
The same mental machinery that allows us to imagine a better future also allows us to imagine a worse future. Hope and despair spring from the same mental machinery.
An animal that can’t imagine things getting worse can’t imagine things getting better. We imagined a different way. We imagined. We planned. We worked towards a future that didn’t yet exist. We can also torture ourselves with a future that doesn’t come. That’s what we did. That’s what we continue to do. The mental machinery of imagining allows us to cut both ways. Animals can’t. We can.
Some people believe that being conscious is a curse.
That the awareness of one’s condition is the problem, and that ignorance would be bliss. But that’s not entirely true either. The same ability to spin a tale that creates despair creates meaning.
Telling a story about one’s life helps one find the meaning in the suffering. It helps one connect the suffering to something larger than oneself. It helps one find the sacrifice worthwhile. Animals don’t have the ability to despair the way we do, nor can they find the meaning we do. But they don’t have the ability to connect the suffering to something larger than themselves, either.
They just endure. We have a greater range of feelings than they do, including the feelings of meaning and meaninglessness. And they combine.
I think I’m coming to believe that it ultimately comes down to the stories we tell to ourselves about our lives. The voice that says “this will never end” can be retrained to say “this is only temporary.”
Storytelling.
The biggest cause of our hope and our despair is the storytelling we do to ourselves. That’s what defines most of our actions.
If what we are doing now has to be broken down into how that action was influenced, a portion of it must be from the present that we are in, and a lot of it could be from the story we could have told ourselves that would have led us to do what we are doing now.
In my darkest of times, I have realised that the suffering itself is not the problem. It’s the story of suffering. That it’s never going to change. That I’m uniquely and especially broken. That the suffering I’m going through right now represents the entirety of my future. It’s just suffering. Not a judgment, not a prediction of the future, just a current experience that’s going to change. Despair changes to hope, and that changes my present.
Animals just naturally live in this space. We have to fight to get there again and again.
I’m not trying to preach anything here. It is not that easy. But there is something to think about.
The animal kingdom has endured unimaginable suffering for millions of years. Pain, loss, predation, hunger. And yet none of them seem to think that life itself is the cause of that suffering. Only we do. Only we have the capacity to tell ourselves a story about it. Only we have the capacity to step back far enough to question it all. And that is our blessing. It is also our curse. It is our curse because it can lead us down paths that animals never walk.
I am not a vet, and I don’t know what animals feel. I love being around animals. I live with my dog, and he is my best friend.
I don’t know what goes on inside their minds. Maybe there is suffering that I don’t even begin to understand. Maybe there is pain that is so much more terrible than mine.
But I know that wolf kept going. It was grieving, it was tired, it was lonely, and it was drinking that water. It was moving forward, step by step. Not because it hoped for something better. Not because it believed that things would get better. But because it was not capable of telling itself a story about how it would always be lonely or wouldn’t be lonely at all in some time when it might find its pack back.
Maybe that is not wise, and it is just ignorant. But looking at that wolf, I felt a twinge of envy. For a creature that cannot torture itself with time. For a creature that cannot tell itself a story that leads to despair. And I wondered what it would take to be like him. To feel only what is happening.
dolphins commit suicide