複選題24.(AB) Though ostensibly focused on animal behavior, Playing Possum is just as much an inquiry into how humans interpret those behaviors. (AC) Animals can respond to death in surprising ways: Ants remove the dead from their colonies; elephants bury their corpses; whales carry their dead across the sea. (AD) While the behaviors may seem familiar, Monsó warns against interpreting them too easily through a human lens. (AE) Experts draw on behavioral science and comparative psychology to describe how a range of animals address mortality. (BC) Ants, she argues, react to chemical signals rather than conceptualize death, while animals like chimpanzees or peccaries show more varied, perhaps cognitive, responses to the death of kin. (BD) Powerful images such as this leap out of Spanish philosopher Susana Monsó’s book, Playing Possum, an engaging inquiry into animals and their notions of mortality. (BE) She contends that traits often thought to distinguish us, such as morality, rationality, culture, and even the concept of death, exist in other species as well.