Ants will do things like take dead ants out of the colony and into the refuse pile.
If we take oleic acid and we put it on a live ant, the other ants will treat it like a dead ant and take it out to the refuse pile.
So they’re not really understanding death.
The concept of death has often been understood in very cognitively demanding ways — as somehow requiring an understanding of infinity or absence.
They understood that the baby could no longer hurt them, that its nonfunctionality was irreversible.
Persons:
they’re