#Angry chimpanzee drawing manual

Is suicide a choice in the traditional sense of the word or is it the consequence of a pathological state? This is a key point if we are to attribute it to animals, whose capacity for choice differs from our own due to our unique ability to synthesize past, present, and future. Even the parameters of what constitutes suicide in humans are debated - this is as much a matter of philosophy and semantics as it is of biology and psychology.Īre kamikaze pilots and “suicide bombers” true suicides, for example? They typically don’t exhibit the psychopathologies of those who commit suicide and are motivated more by political or religious reasons than by a true desire to die.

#Angry chimpanzee drawing manual

Risk factors for human suicide are still indeterminate and suicide behavior disorder was listed as a “ disorder for further consideration ” in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition: DSM-5. It’s a complicated question, made even more so by the fact that we don’t fully understand the complexities of why humans kill themselves. He has devoted his career to advocating on behalf of marine mammals, most famously in the 2009 documentary The Cove, which exposed the annual slaughter of some 2,000 dolphins in Taiji, Japan.īut is it true? Are non-human animals actually capable of purposely ending their own lives? As O’Barry tells it, the event motivated him to pursue a life of activism. This is a tantalizing anecdote - tragic, moving, and evocative of the plight of dolphins and other highly intelligent animals in captivity. He claims the former cetacean starlet swam into his arms, sank to the bottom of the tank and refused to resurface, drowning herself. She was all alone in a concrete tank - not a good thing for a highly social animal like a dolphin. O’Barry, who had captured her from the wild and trained her to perform, remembers thinking that she seemed depressed. In April 1970, Ric O’Barry visited a dolphin named Kathy at the Miami Seaquarium, where she was languishing in “retirement” after three years as the title character on the television show Flipper.