Do animals put each other out of their misery?
September 30, 2005 11:03 AM   Subscribe

We just had the really sad task of putting our pet dog to sleep because she had advanced cancer. I started thinking...do any other animals besides humans kill out of mercy? i.e. do animals put other animals out of their misery? Has their been any research done on this? I'm looking more for evidence and research than opinion.
posted by edjusted to Pets & Animals (12 answers total)
 
I don't think they need to, predators take care of it for them. Once you are too slow or wounded to escape you go from grandpa to lunch pretty quickly. I think only the top of the food chain has to deal with mercy killing.
posted by any major dude at 11:16 AM on September 30, 2005


I've heard that parrots sometimes commit suicide. That kind of blew my mind.
posted by trbrts at 11:26 AM on September 30, 2005


It depends on how you define suicide.

I believe that the term "suicide" means a conscious decision to end a life. It presumes that something is sentient and knows what it is doing.... I strongly disagree with referring to animals jumping off cliffs (such as lemmings) as suicides. I don't think that is suicide. In the case of wolf spiders being devoured by their young, the female is dying because of an inbuilt response - it's not a conscious decision like suicide. The female has simply lived her life and chemicals are released that start to kill her. The babies take advantage! (via)
posted by danb at 11:33 AM on September 30, 2005


Watership Down taught me that pregnant rabbits will "reabsorb" their embryos if there is a threat. Don't know if that counts.
posted by matildaben at 11:36 AM on September 30, 2005


edjusted, the only instance I can think of is: bees. At the end of the foraging season, the worker bees will kill the drones, as they are not needed during the fall and winter, and would only deplete the hive's supplies.

This isn't particularly merciful, however, it's more of survival instinct. But... they do save the drones from starving to death: they kill them as opposed to simply ejecting them form the hive.
posted by Specklet at 12:25 PM on September 30, 2005


Oh, and rabbits (and many other rodents) will eat their young if they feel a threat is posed, as well as reabsorb them in the womb.
posted by Specklet at 12:26 PM on September 30, 2005


Domestic cats often "go away to die" on their own (dogs as well?) if they have the opportunity.

Having no empirical backup, I'd extrapolate that this is an offshoot of pack behavior- the old and sick peel themselves off as food for predators, keeping them away from the healthy pack.
posted by mkultra at 12:35 PM on September 30, 2005


And I'm really sorry to hear about your doggie :(
posted by mkultra at 12:35 PM on September 30, 2005


In the PBS documentary Cloud's Legacy, a horse kills a foal with a birth defect. While it was gruesome to watch, and probably wasn't painless, I considered it a mercy killing.
posted by tomierna at 1:10 PM on September 30, 2005


Tomierna, it could also be a survivalist act to protect the family and the rest of the foals, in case the one with the defect had a communicable disease or would be prone to infection; also to save resources from being "wasted" on the sick one. Mother cats will often leave a sickly kitten to die alone, protecting the rest of the litter; if you try to return the kitten to its mother, the mother will just pack up the rest of the litter and move away. Though the fact that the horse went out of the way to kill the foal, rather than let it die on its own, is interesting.
posted by purple_frogs at 1:22 PM on September 30, 2005


The foal on Cloud's Legacy was killed by a stallion; it was offspring of a rival stallion. So yes, it was deformed, but I think the fact that it was alien to the herd influenced the stallion's behavior.
posted by Specklet at 2:26 PM on September 30, 2005


Response by poster: Thank you all for the info and the kind words. It sounds like animals will kill "their own" for reasons other than to "put them out of their misery." If anyone has any other info along those lines, please let us know!
posted by edjusted at 11:10 PM on October 2, 2005


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