Squirrel guarding body of its friend?

September 11, 2014 • 2:01 pm

Here’s a video that purportedly shows a squirrel guarding the body of its friend, who was bashed by a car, from crows who want to nom it.  And it sure looks like that, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe that squirrels have that kind of empathy.

On the other hand, recent experiments here at Chicago, by Peggy Mason and her colleagues, show that rats have a kind of empathy. When a rat is in an enclose with another rat trapped in a smaller box that is latched shut, the “free” rat will unlatch the box and release the other rat, even when it doesn’t get a reward.

Curiously enough, the trapped rat has to be one that the Samaritan rat is familiar with through experience. That is, the Samaritan will free a rat of the same strain that it’s been raised with, or of another strain if it’s been raised with that one, but it will not free a rat of its own same strain if it hasn’t been raised with members of its strain. That suggests what Paul Bloom’s studies on infants show: babies are proto-empathic, but only to people with whom they’re familiar.

So if rats can show a form of empathy, why not another rodent: the squirrel?

From One Green Planet, which simply presents the explanation as fact (bad science reporting!):

Animals aren’t as different from people as we sometimes tend to think they are. They understand more than we give them credit for, and have more emotionally complex lives than we assume.

This is heartbreaking; this squirrel just lost his friend, who was hit by a car on the road. But this squirrel won’t let the crows have him just yet. He is reacting in grief for the loss of his friend. We usually think this kind of mourning as an exclusively human quality. It’s easy to assume that because animals look so different from us, or because they can’t speak our languages, that they don’t feel the same emotions.

But let this squirrel prove that old mythology wrong. Maybe if we can all start realizing that animals are as emotionally complex as we are, then we would take more seriously the times when human activity effects their lives.

Judge for yourself. I have to say, though, that I once saw a squirrel dragging the body of a dead squirrel across the quad. At first I thought it just intended to eat the carcass, but I don’t think squirrels are that carnivorous. Maybe it was also being empathic in a way.

h/t: Jim E.

43 thoughts on “Squirrel guarding body of its friend?”

  1. We are assuming the squirrel understands that his partner is dead and what that means. That would be one self aware squirrel. His partner (relative/mate) continues to be just that for as long as it looks and smells like his partner. It looks like the squirrel Is simply defending his kin from a predator.

    1. how in the world can he know that the other squirrel is NOT dead? if they were that stupid they would not be able to take care of themselves in the wild…Jeez…

    1. That’s no mother – there are huge testes in that squirrel. My guess is he doesn’t realise the squirrel is dead and is reacting to predators near a mate. I’m not sure ’empathy’ is the word I would use.

  3. I think mourning might be assuming too much. It seems clear that the squirrel is protecting the dead squirrel, but does the squirrel understand that the other squirrel is dead?

    1. I saw on a recent episode of “Alone” where a contestant had snared a squirrel and another came down and was SCREAMING at her and it’s dead companion. It’s hand on the dead creatures shoulders shaking it, trying to wake it. If that’s not mourning, I don’t know what else to call it.

  4. I think that many animals are genetically predisposed to protect relatives. It may be that the squirrel did not realize the other was dead, or was not sure. Certainly it was not thinking as we do, so it could have been acting “on instinct”.

    1. This was my thought as well. It’s protecting kin or mate without realizing the protectee is already dead.

  5. Just a few days ago, I saw a squirrel running back and forth near a dead squirrel in the road. I’ve also seen a bird do this with a dead bird.

  7. I seemed to remember I had seen this before on WEIT, or maybe it was a reasonable guess. Go down to Heather Dalgleish’s comment #7 for that video among others.

    I post the article link, because Jerry’s article, the comments and all the videos gives a good context to animal behavior around dead animals. But now with added rat empathy. =D

    1. For some reason I thought so too, even up to the comment that Jerry had seen a squirrel dragging around a corpse himself, but I can’t find the post.

  8. A propensity for empathy towards other members of one’s group seems to me to be as strong an explanation, among social mammals, for altruism as kin relationships, as evidenced by the rat experiments noted in Jerry’s post.

  9. I have seen the same thing; a squirrel sitting next to a dead squirrel in the middle of the road. I pulled over and watched as it ran off and back on the road back to its kin every time a car went by. I contemplated what type of experience it was having. You would be hard pressed to convince me that it was void of some kind of emotion….

  10. I’ve seen pigeons ‘protect” an injured/dying pigeon right up until the time it dies, then they tuck in for a nice meal of warm protein.

    Although squirrels aren’t carnivores, in nature most animals will not pass up easily available protein. My bet is that the other squirrel will be chowing down, albeit out of sight.

    Rats are considered to be herbivores, but they’ll eat anything. Their tree-dwelling cousins may well be just as flexible when it comes to food.

    1. I would go with trying to protect a close relatve. Squirrels ar know robbers of bird nests, consuming eggs or nestlings. It would surprise me if it didn’t consume part of the dead one – perhaps brain – protein and high fat content.

    2. I think it may want to eat it. There are lots of carnivorous squirrel videos on YouTube. I posted some of them on an older post here about the carnivorous squirrel eating a baby.

    3. Rats are actually omnivores, though depending on what species and their environment may have a predominantly herbivorous diet or not (say, wild city dwelling rattus norvegicus eating from restaurant trash vs ones living in more rural grain producing areas). Or domestic ones, whose people feed them an herbivorous diet (like the rats I have had). But they LOVE chocolate- seriously, they are crazy about it- which is why in that empathy study that was mentioned, this part was a very big deal:
      “As a test of the power of this reward, another experiment was designed to give the free rats a choice: free their companion or feast on chocolate. Two restrainers were placed in the cage with the rat, one containing the cagemate, another containing a pile of chocolate chips. Though the free rat had the option of eating all the chocolate before freeing its companion, the rat was equally likely to open the restrainer containing the cagemate before opening the chocolate container.

      “That was very compelling,” said Mason, Professor in Neurobiology. “It said to us that essentially helping their cagemate is on a par with chocolate. He can hog the entire chocolate stash if he wanted to, and he does not. We were shocked.”

  11. Calling it “empathy” implies getting inside the squirrel’s head and understanding how it “feels”. It would be best, in my opinion, to stick with the observed behavior and see if there is a plausible evolutionary explanation for it. At that point, I’m with those who suggest kin selection for protecting relatives.

    1. Right. I think the term “empathy” should probably be reserved for more complex animals. Now, where that boundary lies, I’m not sure. I would have to say chimps are a good candidate for possessing the “je ne sais quoi”.

    2. Kin selection (or any other evolutionary explanation) doesn’t argue against squirrel emotions; it argues for them.

      Humans are obviously subject to kin selection too, and the way it works with us is not by involuntarily moving our limbs to effect adaptive behaviors. It works by influencing our emotions, which in turn compel us to voluntary action in defense of our kin.

      The parsimonious assumption is that it works the same way in squirrels: the live squirrel defends the dead one because its emotions compel it to do so. So getting into the squirrel’s head and understanding how it feels becomes part of the evolutionary explanation.

      2. Thank you! I was going to try making that point myself, but you just did a much better job than I would have.

  12. How social are squirrels normally? Rats and prairie dogs are extremely social animals, but I haven’t got the slightest clue about squirrels; are they normally solitary or do they live in some sort of group?

      1. I knew they had large litters- they’re rodents, after all. I just wondered how social they were after they were grown.

  13. I’d assume that the squirrel is trying to stay close to a relative or mate, not understanding death, and is protecting itself, the dead squirrel, or both. However, we can’t overlook the possibility that the squirrel is trying to scavenge the carcass.

  16. I’m not sure it was here I posted it, but might as well:
    About five or six years ago in Flushing during a pretty hot summer I saw a bit of squirrel and dead squirrel weirdness on the way to work. It was maybe 6-6:30 am-ish. A squirrel was dragging around a limp and probably dead squirrel on the sidewalk, and it was tossing the body in the air, jerking it about and flipping it head over tail, with it landing bent up in ways probably wouldn’t happen if it were alive. When people walked by the live squirrel would flatten out on the sidewalk, like it was trying to play dead rather than running away. I’ve never seen a squirrel do that outside of this one time. No aggression at all to people. It was panting a bit too I think. The dead squirrel didn’t seem to have any trauma to it, and there was no blood, so I thought maybe it had died from the heat. Maybe the live squirrel was a bit nutty from the heat too.

  17. I’ll play Devil’s Advocate for a minute.

    Squirrels will supplement their diet with meat if it’s available (also eggs and bones). I don’t know if they engage in opportunistic cannibalistic scavenging like this but it could very well be that he’s defending a carcass from other scavengers. I’m not sure there’s a strong case to be made here, but it should be considered as an alternative hypothesis.

  19. I have wondered for a time if something analogous to emotion is a mechanism by which instincts are implemented. In other words, do “lesser” animals (or we) have instincts which would operate through emotion to achieve an end. Do birds fly south because they have some need to fly south or because an emotion drives them to that behavior?

    What are the tie-ins between emotions, behaviors, and instincts?

    1. What difference would there be between a need to fly south, and an emotional drive to fly south? How would the need make itself known to the bird, if not through the emotions?

      1. Exactly!

        So what we call emotions are truly footprints of instinct. In this case why is it surprising that animals other than Homo sapiens display behaviors we will classify as driven by emotion?

  20. Yep, it’s Islam. So let’s go! War! Holy war, in the name of “freedom” (which, as everyone from Bill Kristol to Joe Biden admits, is a stand-in for Christianity).

    Maybe we could stop fulfilling ISIL’s expectations and for once turn down the invitation to fight a war over religion. Let the Middle East solve their own problems and come to a lasting peace on their own. America’s solution to any problem, ever since the 1890s, has been to intervene militarily — but maybe we could for once show that we’re better than them, not get involved, and instead focus on the myriad problems we have here at home. You know, like stagnant funding for scientific research, our broken education system, poverty, ignorance, racism, etc.

    Yes, ISIL is Islam. And fighting Islam is not the purview of the United States government, and more military actions can only make things worse.

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