Mournful Creatures
"Crows have been known to place twigs and leaves next to a companion crow’s body; a fox who found its mate dead was seen doing the same thing; wolves were once observed burying the carcasses of their two-week old pups; mother giraffes linger, sometimes for days, near their dead calves; and elephants often cover the remains of a companion with sticks and dirt and then stand guard.
“Grief occurs widely in other social mammals and in birds, for example after loss of a parent, offspring, or mate,” the British psychologist John Archer wrote in his 1999 study, The Nature of Grief. It occurs in other animals, including human animals, because we all love—that ill-defined emotion and strange force that we only hesitantly ascribe to other species. Yet love may be natural selection’s most compelling force, driving us and our fellow animals to care beyond reason for our families, loved ones, and children. Love, the biologist Bernd Heinrich has written, is the kind of emotion “necessary where rationality alone would not suffice to carry the day.”