No one doubts that animals may die from some voluntary action of their own; for example, a dog may die of eating poisoned food, or a horse may die from a blow caused by jumping over a space with insufficient caution and observation, or a monkey may cut his throat by imitating a man shaving; similar deaths would not be called suicide in man. The tendency of the present day is rather in favour of granting to the lower beings of creation a larger share of intelligence than used to be assigned to them. Not many years ago it was almost universally granted that animals had no soul, and no future life, and only a limited instinct in this life; no reasoning powers, and no foreknowledge of approaching death; all these points have of late years been declared to be uncertain.
If we deny to animals powers of reflection and knowledge of a necessary death, it is not possible to assent to the statement that an animal can in its own mind decide to end its life at any certain time.
Some animals, certainly, protest against entering a yard where others have been slaughtered, as if the smell of blood suggested their fate to them, but what we understand as instinct suffices to explain this terror. Birds of prey are known to detect by sight or smell when an animal is about to die; this again is the instinct provided to supply them with food.
If it be true that a scorpion will sting itself to death when irritated beyond measure, I should be inclined to think that it perishes in its efforts to sting its enemies; or if not, I should imagine that the action resembles that of a man tearing his hair from anger, when he cannot injure his opponent. And the same ideas will apply to the case of the bee, which is similarly said to kill itself in wounding its enemy.
Wild birds will refuse food and die, if confined in a cage; and the survivor of a pair of tame birds, after the death of his mate, is often noticed to refuse food and rapidly die of exhaustion; but I should explain such cases by saying that the loss had made so intense an impression on the creature’s consciousness as to supersede the impulse to feed itself.
I myself remember seeing a healthy little dog refuse food, pine away and die, when its young mistress, who had for months hourly petted it, became a mother, and the dog became neglected; its death was from neglect of a voluntary action, but was it volitional?
Regnault, Elias, in his work on Mental Alienation, decides against the possibility of the lower animals ever effecting a voluntary death; he says, “Suicide is the most energetic assertion of man’s superiority; why do not animals conceive and execute it? Because their nature is entirely passive; to them the choice of life or death is not given; man, on the contrary, eminently free and active, is able to extend his energy even as far as self-destruction.”
Narratives of the deaths of animals, especially when these have been pets, are apt to be very unreliable, from the infusion of sentiment, and many of the anecdotes of suicide of animals which I have investigated have a semi-mythical character. The stories to which I give references would close the controversy as to whether animals ever do, or do not commit suicide, i. e., kill themselves with the intention of ending their lives, and not accidentally nor inadvertently, if they could be relied on to possess anything like scientific accuracy. Most of them have been published in newspapers, &c., where errors would be liable to suffer correction.
Aristotle narrates that a horse having been induced to have connection with his own dam, by the artifice of veiling her, for he had refused to do so previously, on seeing what he had done, jumped intentionally from a cliff, and was killed by the fall. See History of Animals, lib. ix., cap. 47.
But Professor Axe, of the Royal Veterinary College, tells me that he has never heard of such a refusal on the part of a horse, neither has he ever observed any instance which seemed to him to point to the intentional self-destruction of any animal.