The nature of suicide: science and the self-destructiveanimal

Edmund Ramsden1,* and Duncan Wilson2

1 Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter, School for Humanities and Social Sciences, Amory Building, Rennes Drive,

Exeter EX4 4RJ, UK2 Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, Second Floor, Simon Building,

Brunswick Street, Manchester M13 9PL, UK

Feature Endeavour Vol.34 Issue1

4 Van Hooff, A.J.L. (1990) From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-Killing in ClassicalAntiquity, Routledge (London and New York), p. 251.

5 St Thomas Aquinas (1947) Summa Theologica (Vol. II, Part II, Q. 64), Benzinger

It is commonly assumed that suicide is a distinctly humanact. Lacking the capacity to visualise and enact their owndeaths, animals are seen to be driven by an instinct of self-preservation. However, discussion over the existence of theself-destructiveanimalhasbeen longbeencentral todebatesover the nature of suicide. By granting animals the capacityto take their own lives, they were granted emotion, intelli-gence, consciousness. By transgressing boundaries betweenanimal andman, scientists and activists in the 19th centurywereunitedbyadetermination toensure thewelfare of both.For their critics, these boundaries were to be maintained –

animal acts of self-destruction were not intentional, butaccidental and instinctual responses to stimuli. Neverthe-less, reflections on the suicidal animal have continued, less ameans of granting consciousness to the non-human, but assymbols and analogies for human acts of self-destructiondevoid of thought or intention.

A singular case of suicideIn 1845, the Illustrated London News reported a ‘SingularCase of Suicide’ in Holmfirth,West Yorkshire. It reflected agrowing fascination with suicide in Victorian Britain,which, by regularly dwelling on its tragic circumstances,was helping to overturn centuries of moral condemnation.1

What made this case ‘singular’, however, was its unfortu-nate subject – ‘a fine, handsome and valuable black dog, ofthe Newfoundland species’.2 The paper described how thedog had

for some days been less animated than usual, but onthis occasion was noted to throw himself in the waterand endeavour to sink by preserving perfect stillnessof the legs and feet. Being dragged out, the dog wastied up for a time, but had no sooner been releasedthan he again hastened to the water and tried to sinkagain and was again got out. This occurred manytimes until at length the animal with repeated effortsappeared to get exhausted, and by dint of keeping hishead determinedly under water for a few minutes,succeeded at last in obtaining his object, for whentaken out this time he was indeed dead.3

As the nineteenth century progressed, the Newfoundlandwas joined by a canvasback duck that drowned itself at the

*Corresponding author: Ramsden, E. (e.ramsden@exeter.ac.uk)1 See, for example, Olive Anderson (1987) Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian

England, Clarendon Press (Oxford).2 Anon (1845) ‘Singular case of suicide by a dog’. Illustrated London News, 1

February, p. 10.3 Ibid.

www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ – see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserve

loss of its mate, a cat that hanged itself on a branchfollowing the death of its kittens, a horse that leapt intoa canal after years of maltreatment and numerous dogsthat starved to death on the graves of their masters. Thecauses were those commonly associated with the suicidalact in humans – love, loyalty, abuse, madness. At the sametime, these accounts of animal self-destruction continued atradition that dates back to Antiquity. Aristotle told of thefamed suicide of the Scythian stallion, which threw itselfinto an abyss after it realised it had been duped intomating with its mother.4 Whilst Aristotle was generallycritical of the suicidal act, he accepted that in cases ofdisgrace, burden or sacrifice, it could benefit the polis.

These tales show how accounts of animal suicide havelong reflected the values of a society. This is the case evenwhen animal suicide is denied. St Augustine and ThomasAquinas sought to justify strictures against self-destruc-tion through reference to the animal kingdom. Animals,they argued, did not strive for death, but life. As Aquinasdeclared:

It is altogether unlawful to kill oneself. . . becauseeverything naturally loves itself, the result being thateverything naturally keeps itself in being, and resistscorruptions so far as it can. Wherefore suicide iscontrary to the inclination of nature, and to charitywhereby every man should love himself. Hencesuicide is always a mortal sin, as being contrary tothe natural law and to charity.5

One of the few descriptions of the self-destructiveanimal that survived in Christian texts was that of thePelican, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice. The Pelican allegedlytore flesh and blood from its breast to feed its young; and itsuse by John Donne, noted for his sympathetic treatment ofthe suicidal act, was, we would argue, significant.6 It wasimportant, Donne contended, that humanity retain ‘anatural desire of dying’: ‘by theLawofNature it selfe, thingsmay, yeamustneglect of themselues for others;Ofwhich thePellican is an Instance, or Embleme.’7

(New York).6 See Jorge Luis Borges (2000) Other Inquisitions: 1937–1952, University of Texas

Press (Austin), pp. 89–92, for a discussion of this significance. Another example thatBorges identifies is that of the bee, which, according to St Ambrose’s Hexaemeron,would kill itself if having violated the laws of its king.

7 Donne (1984) Biathanatos (Sullivan, E.W., II, ed.), University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses (Newark/London), p. 46.

d. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2010.01.005

Figure 1. Image of a dog pining to death on its master’s grave, from The Animal

World article, ‘Faithful unto Death’.

22 Feature Endeavour Vol.34 Issue1

Whilst it may seem self-evident that suicide is a mosthuman of acts, even constitutive of humanity, the questionof the self-destructive animal has long served as a criticalarena in which the nature of suicide is debated. Descrip-tions of animals not only reflect and reinforce acceptedmorality, as Keith Thomas would argue, but also helpcomprise it.8 Our research shows how scientists and socialgroups have used animal suicide to understand and defineself-destructive behaviour – privileging agency or determi-nation, seeking to redeem or condemn and addressing therelation between humans and the natural world.

Animal emotion and reasonAccounts of animal suicide in the nineteenth century reflectcontemporary debates on the relations between animal andhumanminds.Humane groups such as theRoyal Society forProtection of Animals (RSPCA) seized upon popularaccounts to claim that animals shared with humans thecapacities for grief, love, despair – and, moreover, that theypossessed enough intelligence to plan and execute their owndeaths. When the RSPCA journal The Animal Worldreported yet another ‘Remarkable Suicide’ of an old andinfirmdog, it claimed theanimal ‘wasdriven to this climaxofdespair by the desertion of itsmaster’.9Having ‘wandered inthe fields for a while, receiving more blows than crusts’, thedog eventually ‘preferred a violent death to its miserableexistence’.10 Its decision to drown itself in a river was, theauthorwas certain, ‘a deliberate act of will.’11 This and otheraccounts of canine suicide reinforced theVictorian view thatdogs were the most intelligent, noble and loyal of animals(Figure 1). The Illustrated London News described how thesuicide of our ‘proud and noble’ Newfoundland offered proofof the ‘general instinct and sagacity of the canine race’.Following yet another act of animal self-destruction, TheAnimal World questioned:

How is it possible not to be deeply attached to thepoor beast, so good, affectionate & fruitful, & sodevoted, which consecrates its whole life to the ser-vice, pleasures & companionship of its master, whofollows, finds out in the midst of the largest assem-blies, defends & saves, & for whom it sacrifices itself& which often cannot survive the grief of its loss?12

By humanising animal actions and emotions, anti-crueltygroups such as the RPSCA sought to engender sympathyand rebuke those ‘apt to treat lower animals as creaturesborn to labour without sense of enjoyment or pain’.13

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the animal martyrto human cruelty was the stag that leapt off a cliff to escapea pack of hunting dogs. Dismissing claims that huntingwas a noble pastime, enjoyed equally by the dogs and theirquarry, The Animal World argued that ‘it is notorious thatthe wild stag, rather than be overtaken by its pursuers,will. . .fall into the jaws of an awful death.’ Again, suicidewas the preserve of a ‘noble and proud animal of high

8 Keith Thomas (1983) Man and the Natural World, Allen Lane (London).9 Anon (1871) ‘Remarkable suicide of a dog’. The Animal World 3, p. 91.

10 Ibid.11 Ibid., emphasis added.12 Anon (1870) ‘Faithful unto death’. The Animal World 2, p. 29.13 Anon (1873) ‘Animals capable of intellectual pleasures’. The Animal World 4, p.

107.

www.sciencedirect.com

virtues and merits.’ With little hope of survival, the stagchose its own fate. It was, the journal argued, ‘driven todesperation’.14

By the 1870s, claims for animal reason in the humanepress found scientific andmedical support. For the Scottishpsychiatrist William Lauder Lindsay, ‘mind is essentiallythe same in other animals and in man, differing simply inthe degree of its development, and in the mode of itsexpression.’15 It is through the writing of Lindsay thatwe see the most obvious and detailed connections drawnbetween the act of self-destruction in man and animals.Lindsay, like his medical contemporaries, believed manyexhibitions of destructive behaviour ‘were not the simpleproduct of malady, but of malady aggravated by misman-agement.’16 Like people, animals were regularly:

. . .persecuted, ill-used – often literally goaded intofury: and mania is, therefore, the commonest form ofinsanity in animals, the next most frequent varietybeing suicidal melancholia. But, when the law of

14 Anon (1875) ‘Stag-hunting’. The Animal World 6, p. 2.15 William Lauder Lindsay (1871) ‘The physiology of mind in the lower animals’.

Journal of Mental Science 17, 25–82, on pp. 34–35, emphasis in original.16 John Conolly (1856) The Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints,

Smith, Elder & Co. (London), p. 33, quoted in William Lauder Lindsay (1871) ‘Mad-ness in animals’. Journal of Mental Science 17, 181–206, on p. 195, emphasis inLindsay.

23 Ibid., p. 411.24 Lorraine Daston (2005) ‘Intelligences: angelic, animal, human’. In Thinking with

Animals: New Perspectives in Anthropomorphism (Daston, L. and Mittman, G., eds),Columbia University Press (New York), 37–59, on p. 46.25 Lord Byron (1813) The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, John Murray

(London), p. 16. See also Johannes Fabricius (1976) Alchemy: TheMedieval Alchemistsand their Royal Art, Rosenkilde and Bagger (Copenhagen), for a psychoanalytic

Feature Endeavour Vol.34 Issue1 23

kindness dictates man’s treatment of other animals –as it now regulates the management of his insanefellow man – destructive violence at least, and per-haps also desponding suicidal propensity, will doubt-less become much less frequent.17

Lindsay’s articles reflect a broader shift in medical andsocial attitudes to suicide. Contemporary psychiatrists suchas Henry Maudsley were similarly concerned to analysesuicide less as a criminal and moral issue, and more as asocial and medical problem – ‘a natural event of the humandispensation. . .nomore out of keeping than any other modeofdeath.’18YetLindsayandMaudsleydifferedas towhethersuicidewas unique to humans and, in doing so, disagreed onthe relative faculties of animal and human minds.

This difference of opinion became public following the1879 publication of Lindsay’s final work – the two-volumeMind in the Lower Animals, in Health and Disease. Havingnow collected a vast array of correspondence and evidence,Lindsay included a whole chapter on animal suicide, incor-porating 25 examples across 14 species.19 He argued thatthere existed no category of human suicide that did nothave an animal correlate. ‘In all cases,’ he wrote, ‘whetherin animals or man, there is manifest derangement of thepowerful instinct of self-preservation, the strong conserva-tive, ever active, principle of love of life.’20

This could occur for the same variety of reasons inanimals as in man: age, despair, grief, jealousy, despera-tion, captivity, cruelty, insanity, self-sacrifice throughmaternal or social affection, or sheer ennui – the latter,long fabled as a curse of rich women, was also commonamongst their pampered dogs. Crucially, and in all cases,there appeared evidence of ‘choice and consideration’.‘Suicide proper,’ wrote Lindsay, ‘that which involves inten-tion, and frequently plan – occurs in the lower animals.’21

Maudsley disagreed. He chose one of Lindsay’sexamples to counter – a cat that had supposedly strangleditself in a forked branch after its kittens had been drowned.Writing in the journal Mind immediately after the publi-cation of Lindsay’s book, he stated:

It is quite possible that an animal in a state of excite-ment or delirium from pain and illness may make afrantic rush which issues in its death, just as a humanbeingmay do; but that is quite a different thing from adistinctly conceived and deliberately perpetuatedsuicide. Of such an act by any animal below man weare yet in want of satisfactory evidence.22

Lindsay, Maudsley alleged, had been duped by the allureof anthropomorphic reasoning:

Stories of the kind require to be severely sifted, andought not to be accepted unless the narrator. . .hastaken every pains to avoid the common fallacies ofobservation and inference, or has been strictly cross-

17 Lindsay, ibid., p. 195, emphasis in original.18 Gates, B.T. (1980) ‘Suicide and the Victorian physicians’. Journal of the History of

Behavioral Sciences 16, 164–74, on p. 172.19 William Lauder Lindsay (1879) Mind in the Lower Animals, in Health and

Disease: Volume II. Mind in Disease, Kegan Paul & Co. (London), pp. 130–148.20 Ibid., p. 141.21 Ibid., p. 130.22 Henry Maudsley (1879) ‘Alleged suicide of a dog’. Mind 4, 410–413, on p. 412.

www.sciencedirect.com

examined by some one. . .on his guard against thesefallacies.’’23

Inducing animal suicide in the laboratorySuch skepticism was firmly entrenched not by Maudsley,but by the comparative psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan.Fromthe late1880s,Morganargued thatnoobserver shouldinterpretananimal actionas the outcomeof ahighermentalfaculty, if they could explain it through reference to onelower down the psychological scale – such as trial-and-errorlearning or instinct. A book titled Animal Intelligence byGeorge Romanes had provoked Morgan to explicate hisfamed ‘canon’. Published in 1882, it was, as LorraineDastondescribes, ‘a compendiumof storiesabout theallegedmentalabilities of animals, from protozoa to monkeys.’24

When developing his critique of Romanes, Morgan chosea case of animal suicide to argue against the existence ofanimal reason – that of the scorpion. According to Iberianfolklore, when the scorpion was surrounded by flames itwould choose suicide by stinging itself in the back. The storywas popularised byByron, whowould have learnt of it in hisearly travels to the Mediterranean. For Byron, the scorpionconveyed the inner torment of his tragic anti-hero TheGiaour, published in 1813. ‘TheMind, that broods o’er guiltywoes’, he wrote, ‘is like the scorpion girt by fire.’25 TheRomantic motif of the suicidal scorpion would becomeentrenched in scientific accounts, as it became the firstvehicle through which to test theories of animal reasonand instinct.

Romanes relayed several accounts where scorpions hadkilled themselves after being ringed with fire, but notedcautiously, ‘such a remarkable fact unquestionablydemands further corroboration beforeweaccept it unreserv-edly.’26 E. Ray Lankester, professor of zoology at UniversityCollege, London, took up the challenge and, reporting to theLinnaeanSociety late in 1882, claimed that he had observeda scorpion repeatedly trying to strike itself after he admi-nistered chloroform into its glass container. This he believedto ‘throw light on the old tradition’, and tended ‘to confirm itsaccuracy.’27 In 1883, Morgan endeavoured to dispel thisbelief. He designed a set of experiments ‘sufficiently barbar-ous. . .to induce any scorpion who had the slightest suicidaltendency to find relief in self-destruction.’28

He surrounded them with fire, condensed sunbeams ontheir backs, heated them in a bottle, burned them withphosphoric acid, treated them with electric shocks andsubjected them to ‘general and exasperating courses ofworry.’29 Though he witnessed scorpions striking at their

reading of medieval associations between the scorpion (and many other animals)and destruction.26 George Romanes (1882) Animal Intelligence, Kegan Paul & Co. (London), pp. 222–

225.27 Ray Lankester, E. (1882) ‘Notes on some Habits of the Scorpions Androctonus

funestus, Ehr., andEuscorpius italicus, Roes’. Journal of the Linnaean Society: Zoology16, 455–462, on p. 459.28 Lloyd Morgan, C. (1883) ‘Suicide of scorpions’. Nature 27, 313–314, on p. 313.29 Ibid.

24 Feature Endeavour Vol.34 Issue1

backs, this, Morgan explained, was an instinctive attemptto remove irritation. Thosewho ignored or rejected this factwere ‘not accustomed to accurate observation.’ In 1887,Alfred Bourne provided further evidence that questioned‘the phenomenon so graphically delineated by Byron’.Scorpions, he claimed, were immune to their own venom.30

A social maladyAt the same time as Morgan was denying animals thecapacity of intentionally ending their lives, the study ofsuicide was advancing and changing. The Italian psychia-trist Enrico Morselli claimed in an English edition of hisDarwinian treatment of the subject: ‘the motive of everysuicide is not alone that which is apparent; there are other,more secret causes whose existence and influence eludeeven the suicide himself, because they act on him almostunconsciously.’31 Morselli’s work, first published in 1879,had been of considerable influence on the sociologist EmileDurkheim’s famed study of suicide of 1897. At the outset,Durkheim lent his support to Morgan, arguing that whilstthe scorpion did ‘become its victim, though it cannot be saidto have had a preconception of the result of its action’.32 Yethe viewed suicide less as an individualistic act, andmore asa social phenomenon. Acts of self-destruction, he argued,were ‘but confirmation of a resolve previously formed forreasons unknown to consciousness’.33 Suicide was a socialmalady, a disease of civilisation.34

30 Bourne, A.G. (1887) ‘The reputed suicide of scorpions’. Proceedings of the RoyalSociety of London 42, 17–22, on p. 18.31 Enrico Morselli (1881) Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics, Kegan

Paul & Co. (London), p. 8.32 Emile Durkheim (2002) Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Routledge Classics

(London), p. xliii.33 Ibid., p. 262.34 See, for example, Brand, J. (1896) ‘Is suicide a sign of civilization?’ Pearson’s

Magazine 2, pp. 666–667.

www.sciencedirect.com

Within the shift towards understanding suicide as anunconscious and collective process camea shift in depictionsof the suicidal animal.With the apparent humanpropensityfor self-annihilation witnessed during the twentieth cen-tury, attention turned to crowds of animals unintentionallydriven to destruction – be they shoals of fish dashing them-selves off boat hulls, whales beaching themselves on theshore, or hordes of lemmings known to periodically marchacross Norwegian planes to perish in the sea.

ConclusionToday, scientists still conscript animals to help under-stand why people kill themselves.35 Whilst popular andromantic notions of a scorpion or dog dying in defiance orgrief remain, animals more commonly serve as models forunderstanding suicide without intention – the mind andbody as biochemical and genetic phenomena; now evencells serve as crucial supplements to human self-destruc-tion.36 Through shifting archetypes of animal suicide, wecan trace the history of perspectives on self-destruction –

we see the victim and hero of ancient philosophy andromanticism, the martyr or sinner of the Judeo-Christiantradition, the automaton and the neurotic, lost amongstthe masses of modernity. When scientists, philosophers,writers or theologians have reflected upon the nature ofsuicide, they have, persistently, reflected on the naturalworld.

35 See Crawley, J.N., et al. (1985) ‘Animal models of self-destructive behavior andsuicide’. Psychiatric Clinics of North America 8, pp. 299–310; Antonio Preti (2005)‘Suicide among animals: clues from Folklore that may prevent suicidal behaviouramong human beings’. Psychological Reports 97, pp. 547–558.36 See Skulachev, V.P. (2001) ‘The programmed death phenomena, aging, and the

Samurai law of biology’. Experimental Gerontology 36, pp. 995–1024.