Book Review: ‘Playing Possum,’ by Susana Monsó

PLAYING POSSUM: How Animals Understand Death, by Susana Monsó

Our neighbor’s cat, Mittens, was an adventurer who used to sneak into our house whenever the opportunity presented itself. His other hobbies included daily games of tag with his fellow cats on the block and getting into backyard brawls with raccoons. When he went missing a few weeks ago, our own cat started behaving differently. Usually silent and regal, she became clingy and would wail while she stared out the window. “She’s in mourning,” my husband said. We assumed Mittens was dead. Did our cat “assume” the same thing?

Talking about animals and mourning invites inevitable charges of anthropomorphism, that tempting habit of projecting human characteristics on to a nonhuman animal. But as Susana Monsó explains in “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” our fear of anthropomorphism can lead to the opposite sin of “anthropectomy” — the denial that an animal exhibits humanlike characteristics. “Both mistakes are equally serious,” Monsó writes. “They are both false descriptions of reality.”

Monsó is a Spanish philosopher (she translated her book herself), and “Playing Possum” keeps returning to questions of knowledge: what humans know; what animals know; and what humans (may or may not) know about what animals (may or may not) know. Monsó stops such lofty conundrums from floating away into the stratosphere by tethering them to intriguing anecdotes from the natural world — a chimpanzee that carries around the corpse of a bush baby; pregnant mice that reabsorb their fetuses into their bodies to avoid the predations of infanticidal males; ants that can be tricked with chemical markers into treating live ants as dead ones.

I also learned from this book that “playing possum” involves more than simply becoming immobile; when an opossum feels threatened, “she stops responding to the world and starts to salivate, urinate, defecate and expel a repugnant-smelling green goo from her anal glands,” Monsó writes. This seems a lot more involved than just “playing”: Expelling stinky goo is definitely committing to the bit. Monsó compares the imperiled opossum to Schrödinger’s cat, “dead and alive at the same time.”

“Playing Possum” is an unexpected mix of witty and grisly, cerebral and earthy. Monsó doesn’t so much answer questions about death as raise new ones, encouraging us to shed our reflexive anthropocentrism by paying close attention to what animals do, even when it fails to accord with human modes of behavior.

Some animals do appear to experience grief, Monsó says, referring to female giraffes wandering about the area where a calf had died and to peccaries repeatedly grooming a dead peccary’s corpse. She opens the book with a striking photograph from a chimpanzee rescue center that went viral in 2009: A dead chimp named Dorothy is being pushed in a wheelbarrow past a group of her fellow chimps, who are uncharacteristically silent while they stare at her, seemingly solemn and transfixed.