From elephant to chimpanzees , extremely intelligent social animal have often been observed mourning the loss of their friends and group members . Now we can append peccaries , pig - like animals from South and Central America , to the list of animalsthat mourn their deadened .
This latest uncovering was in reality made by an 8 - year - previous male child address Dante de Kort . He was watching a group of five peccaries ( Pecari tajacu ) that were living in his backyard in Arizona , when one female died of illness . Yet he acknowledge that the rest of the herd were still string up around .
fascinate , and with a school day science clean coming up , he installed a television camera trap to see what might be going on when the carcass was moved away from the theatre due to the growing pong . Over the next 10 day , de Kort captured the first ever evidence of peccaries bear in a means that evoke they weremourning the deathof their ally .
But it was only after de Kort showed his findings at his school fair that he realized the significance of what he had filmed , as attending that comely was Mariana Altrichter , who just so happens to be co - president of the Peccary Specialist Group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature . She come in contact with de Kort and his mother , and said that she consider what he had recorded might be alone .
Altrichter then bring on the project , and studied the 100 video that de Kort had taken of the event . These have now been written up in a scientific paper and put out in the journalEthology , with de Kort as the study ’s first author .
The paper document how the animate being tended to visit the corpse either on their own or in duo , and continue to do so even after it was moved aside from where the female person initially die , show that they were not simply returning to the spot of death . What they did during their visits alter , including “ press at the dead person , staring at it , biting it , and trying to piece it up by putting their snout under the corpse and pushing it up,”write the authors .
The musk hog pass most of their clock time with the corpse at dark , with some of them even sleeping next to it , cuddling up closely . After a few weeks , a pack of coyotes proceed in to try and give , but even then the peccary chase the predators away . Eventually , the prairie wolf won out , and the musk hog stopped render to the carcass .
The authors suspect that this kind of behavior , specially in highly social creature , is not strange , it ’s just that researchers rarely get to keep an eye on the natural last of individuals in the wild .
