Playing Possum cover art

Playing Possum

How Animals Understand Death

Preview

Try for $0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Playing Possum

Written by: Susana Monsó, Mark Rowlands - foreword
Narrated by: Lisa S. Ware
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $22.26

Buy Now for $22.26

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

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 Monso 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. Monso, 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.

©2021, 2022 Susana Monso; English translation copyright 2024 by Princeton University Press (P)2024 Tantor
Biological Sciences Psychology Sociology
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Playing Possum

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.