Photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla in Münster Zoo, holding the lifeless body of her three-month-old infant, are doing the rounds of the world's media. The pictures have prompted headlines such as "Heartbreaking" and "A Mother's Grief". Gana certainly looks inconsolable at the loss of her child. But is she? Are we too quick to project human feelings onto animals, particularly our closest ape relatives?
The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes believed that anything without a soul was merely a machine - an automaton. Only humans, he believed, have souls, so animals are no more capable of higher emotion than a clock.
But, as anyone who has been watching Richard Dawkins' Channel 4 series The Genius of Darwin will recall, evolution favours any species with strong enough parental instincts to see their young through infancy. Animals invest time, energy and genetic material into their young, just as we do, and they naturally want them to survive. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that they would also feel loss when their young die?
Andrew King, a research scientist at the Zoological Society of London, has been observing wild baboons in Namibia for years: "When an infant dies, a female will sometimes carry it round for a number of days, grooming it and exhibiting stressful behaviour." He is reluctant to describe this as grief in the human sense. "Yes, the animal is distressed," he says, "but it's not necessarily the norm." Some baboons walk away from their dead offspring without any apparent concern. Gana has a history of neglecting her young, and the infant's death may have been a result of her poor parenting. So perhaps it's not so much grief as guilt she's exhibiting. Or maybe that's an anthropomorphic step too far.