Wellness

BEAUTIFUL BEASTS EMOTIONS

by Charlotte Dumas. The wolf Lukas from the Reverie series.

The fact that animals can’t articulate their emotions verbally doesn’t put them that far behind many humans. But many animals do feel and can express how they feel in other ways.

Today, we are taking a look at Beautiful Beasts whose hearts and souls are deep, whose minds think about what they have and what they’ve lost, whose personal and social lives are impacted by love and by grief.

My cats, Heckle and Jeckyl, were littermates who adored each other for years. One day, Heckle failed to return home from her daily excursion into the woods, and her sister freaked.

Wracked with grief, Jeckyl mourned the loss for months. She couldn’t live without her dear sister and her resulting behavior (peeing on every piece of upholstered furniture we owned) made it impossible to live with her. She became right again only when she got introduced to some new feline playmates -- and found a new sister.

Photographer Charlotte Dumas takes deeply intimate emotional portraits of Beautiful Beasts. They are palpably heavy -- dense in both resolution and gravitas. She captures the tenderness of social animals as they react to the losing a mate, a pack-fellow, a child or a friend.

Dumas’ shots feel black and white, although they are not. They are somber, focusing on the color of her subjects’ minds. From lone wolves to funeral horses, from rescued survivors to strays, her beasts have sad hearts that will touch yours.

Elephants hold wakes for their dead. They visit the bodies of their loved ones for weeks and tend to their remains. They carry on even when it comes down to the skeletons. Watch them in this video.

Crows will circle a fallen comrade and shroud it with leaves of grass and twigs. And if they lose a mate, they really stress out.

Chimpanzee, bonobo, baboon, and dolphin mothers all don’t let go of their dead babies so easily. They mourn. They cling, often carrying them for weeks after they’ve died. Babies mourn their mothers too.

Western scrub jays hold “funerals” for their dead. Teresa Iglesias, of the University of California at Davis suggest, in the journal Animal Behavior, that this might be to warn their living friends of danger. The jays circle their dead flock-mates. And they stop foraging for food for days. They chant together “zeep zeep zeep” and call for more jays to come to mourn.

Photographer Edward Selfe has taken dozens of achingly beautiful photos of grieving giraffes. These animals have been known to mourn deeply. In 2010, for example, in the Soysambu Conservancy in Kenya, a female giraffe and 17 of her girlfriends, spent four days beside the body of her one-month-old calf. Giraffes can hang around there for weeks. They are rarely alone, in life or in death.