Are the same issues considered when animals commit suicide as when people commit suicide?

Suicide refers to the process of self-injurious behavior that is known to be fatal by others or oneself while the person is conscious. There are four key points in this definition: first, it must be a conscious act; second, this act does not have to be carried out by the suicidal person himself, such as euthanasia; third, it must be known to be lethal; fourth, suicide It should include its preparation, implementation of suicidal behavior, and the aftermath of suicide.

It can be seen from this that people who want to commit suicide should have self-awareness and a certain understanding of the nature of life. They should be aware of the irreversible consequences that suicide can cause. There is also a very important point. That It is to develop a personal understanding of the value of life based on understanding the meaning of life. For suicides, the value of life is often underestimated.

So suicidal behavior can only occur in intelligent creatures with certain self-understanding and value judgment capabilities. Although scientific research has proven that dolphins, elephants and apes have a certain degree of self-awareness and show no reaction to the death of their own kind. Personifications of sadness and shock, but there is no clear evidence whether they carry a deep understanding of the meaning of life.

Let’s use specific examples.

There are reports of toothed whales "committing suicide" ashore all over the world, but a closer analysis shows that they are all due to various unintentional reasons, such as predation, geomagnetic interference, parasites affecting the brain, or excessive treatment. There is no evidence that cetaceans feel "tired of living" and commit suicide due to accidental situations such as rescue of companions.

Let’s look at the lemmings again. These stubby, yellowish-brown rats did die en masse, but that was the result of misjudgment. Lemmings are locusts among mammals. They eat away every last drop of their habitat and then begin to migrate in large numbers in search of new feeding grounds. They scale boulders, skirt around trees, and pass anything in their way. If they encounter water, they will try to swim across it, and they are often seen doing this near streams and ponds. If they happen to hit a lake or ocean, they will find it too late by the time they find they can no longer swim. The advancing footsteps of their companions will not allow them to stop, just like the stampede of a crowd in a crowded place.

There are also those unlucky husbands - spiders and mantises. The males of these small animals are much smaller than the females, and their special mating posture exposes their bodies to the mouths of larger females. They are often regarded as food. Is this an act of male rational suicide? Obviously not. I have observed the daily ecology of these little animals countless times and found that males carefully avoid appearing directly opposite their mates before mating. Most of them quickly slip away after mating and are not treated as snacks. Tragedy will only occur if mating makes the reaction slow, or the body position is quite unfavorable. For example, if a limb happens to be under the female's mouth, some insects will instinctively chew anything that reaches its mouth. In other words, being eaten is purely An accident. If you break off any of the insect's own legs and put it to its mouth, it will still chew it with relish. Even if you put hair and grass stalks that are obviously not their regular food to the mantis's mouth, they will still eat it!

Some social animals have obvious states of anxiety and depression after they lose their group (an animal in captivity loses its owner), or after the death of its partner (more precisely, it suddenly disappears). If it is not relieved for a long time, the body's endocrine disorders will occur. The blood acid and adrenaline produced will be toxic to the body, and in severe cases, it can lead to death. On the surface, it looks similar to the suicidal tendencies that occur after a person suffers a major setback. , but it is doubtful how many emotional factors are involved: this is caused by the break of the fixed lifestyle and the physical discomfort. The death of companions brings insecurity to these animals, and for animals with a particularly strong survival instinct Generally speaking, the lack of security gives them a sense of crisis that they are threatened at any time. It has been elaborated in animal behavior for a long time and is called "stress response". Many animals find it difficult to feed themselves when they leave their original environment. This is the case with the familiar sparrows. , some people say that they were angry to death. To be more precise, they had endocrine disorders due to stress and fear. They died from the body chaos caused by this disorder: rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, lack of appetite, etc., which consumed a lot of physical energy. But the exhaustion that cannot be replenished is precisely because the survival instinct is too strong, which is exactly the opposite of their seemingly "suicidal behavior".

I have come into contact with many kinds of animals, and their understanding of death is varied. A chicken waiting to be slaughtered in a cage will numbly peck at the rice in the stomach of its companion who has just been killed and disemboweled; a meat dog sees its companion being killed. They will make extremely miserable screams after being killed; what shocks me the most is that the mother monkey will hold on to the child that unfortunately died young and refuse to let go until the body of the baby monkey decomposes due to extreme decay... But no animal is like humans. In-depth exploration of life phenomena, so suicide should be a patent only for human beings. Everything stems from the fact that we sometimes think too much, but our thoughts are not necessarily reasonable all the time.

If any animal other than humans chooses to give up its own life, then it should be our strong competitor in the future, because only when the rationality rises to a certain height will it be able to think wildly and be able to Creatures with random thoughts are not simple.

The animal never thinks too much: the mother monkey holding the baby monkey's body will use her other hand to fight with her companion for food. It is just confused: Why is the child not moving? A female monkey with children will be taken care of in the group, and the corpse in hand is her trump card, nothing more.

I don’t know if I should feel lucky to be human.