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Title details for Playing Possum by Susana Monsó - Available

Playing Possum

How Animals Understand Death

by Susana Monsó
Mark Rowlands
Audiobook
11 of 12 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
11 of 12 copies available
When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.
With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today's leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.
Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 15, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798855577051
      • File size: 206145 KB
      • Duration: 07:09:27

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In barely seven hours, this fascinating and well-researched audiobook opens a window into a science many listeners may not know exists: thanatology, the study of death and its effects. Do animals understand death, and if so, how? The examples--which include elephants, primates, and possums--provide criteria for answering these questions, often with unexpected results. Lisa Ware is a lively and stylish narrator but an odd choice for this narrative, which doesn't require enlivening and is in no way perky. Ware's style is lilting and melodramatic, and she doesn't follow her author's syntax so much as enhance it with her own stresses and shadings. This book has been receiving strong reviews, but this odd and distracting miscasting makes print the preferred choice. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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