What crows teach us about death | Kaeli Swift (re-release)
Saturday, 31 October 2026 · 2 min read · Listen to the episode ↗
Kaeli Swift discusses what crows’ responses to dead members of their species can—and cannot—tell us about animal understanding of death. Her experiments found that crows later treated people associated with dead crows as threats and avoided food at locations where corpses had appeared. These behaviors may reflect learning about danger, grief, or both; they do not prove crows experience death as humans do.
Crows’ responses to dead members of their species show that animals can notice death and change their behavior in response, but they do not establish that crows understand death as humans do. Kaeli Swift says a gathering around a dead crow could help birds learn about the corpse, what caused its death, or dangers nearby; grief is another possible explanation. These explanations are not mutually exclusive, and no single account explains the full range of animal responses.
Crows commonly raise an alarm when one finds a dead crow, drawing other birds into a mob. Swift’s experiments show that these encounters can have lasting consequences. Researchers first fed breeding pairs for three days, then presented a person wearing a mask with a dead crow. Over the following six weeks, most crows treated people they had seen handling dead crows as threats.
The birds also changed how readily they approached food at places where dead crows had been presented. Control groups did not show the same decline, suggesting crows associate locations with dead members of their species and may regard those places as risky. Together, the findings indicate that attention to a corpse can inform later responses to both people and places, without proving what the birds experience emotionally.
Swift places crow behavior within comparative thanatology, the study of animal responses to death, a term introduced in 2016. Animal reactions range from predictable behaviors studied experimentally to more variable responses documented mainly through anecdotes. Social insects may remove or consume corpses, or build tombs, in ways associated with colony hygiene; rats reliably bury cage mates that have been dead for 48 hours. Elephants, primates, and dolphins have also been observed attending to or transporting dead individuals.
Across hundreds of trials involving hundreds of pairs, crows made sexual, aggressive, or exploratory contact with dead crows only 30% of the time. Other responses included alarm calling and forceful pecking. Swift emphasizes that contact behaviors were a minority, underscoring how varied responses to the dead can be. The observations support careful study of what animals do around corpses, while leaving open whether any particular behavior reflects learning, danger assessment, grief, or more than one of these.
This summary was generated from the episode transcript and can contain mistakes.