Death is the inevitable end of all living things, and for human beings, holding funerals for the deceased has become a unique cultural tradition.
For some animals, death is also not a common thing, and their attitude towards the dead is very similar to that of humans.
Crows are particularly prominent in "honoring" the dead, as many people should have heard of – they hold funerals for the dead.
The crow's funeral
When one crow dies, another crow found dead makes a harsh and urgent cry, and after a while a flock of crows will arrive.
The crows that came to hear the noise were sometimes small, sometimes as many as 60 or 70, and they stood quietly on the nearby trees that could be inhabited.
For a short time, they were all silent, only to suddenly let out a scream, and the scene was solemn, desolate and solemn.
After about 15 to 20 minutes of silence and screaming, all the "men in black" quickly dispersed, leaving only the branches still trembling.
This action of the crow bears too much resemblance to the scene when the human deceased is buried, and it is not an exaggeration to call it "the funeral of the crow".
So why do they hold funerals for the dead? Are they also meant to mourn the dead? Let's first revisit this unusual bird.
Not simple crows
Crows are recognized as highly intelligent animals, known as the "Einstein of Birds", they can solve puzzles inspired by Aesop's fables, and can learn to use tools.
The flip side of genius is willfulness: as a scavenger omnivore, crows can eat almost anything, including small animals, other birds, and dead creatures.
In the past, on the battlefield where the two armies fought, there were always crows circling above, and they did not want to watch the battle, but waited for the soldiers to die, so that they could have a full meal.
It is for this reason that many people believe that crows are a symbol of death, but scavengers are "very human", and crows are only one of them.
But in the Americas, crows are the lucky charms of indigenous peoples, and many tribes use crows as imagery in their death rituals and customs.
Crows also have a long history in other cultures, the "golden crow" in the ancient mythology of our country is actually a crow crouching in the sun; in Muslim mythology, a crow is cursed black because it leaks the location of the prophet; in Greek mythology, the sun god turned his betraying lover into a crow...
Regardless of their cultural positioning, in reality they are some very vengeful guys, and this characteristic is the key to explaining the crow's funeral.
Illustration: The crow in mythology
Behind the funeral
Revenge is also a kind of memory, if the memory is not good and soon forget what the enemy looks like, the crow can remember the revenge means that they have a good memory.
As mentioned above, the death of a crow usually attracts the "mourning" of a group of crows, not next to the dead crow, but on a nearby branch.
A dead crow lies on the ground and a group of living crows gather nearby, a scene sometimes referred to as a "murder scene."
But is this kind of "murder scene" like a funeral really a "funeral"? Are they really mourning this unfortunate companion?
As if not, researchers have shown that the crows behave in such a way that they are not so much holding funerals as they are in a meeting.
They are not the aftercare meeting of the dead crow, but the wake-up meeting to warn the living crows, and they learn from the suffering of the dead.
The researchers found that when a crow saw another dead crow, the hippocampus in its brain was activated, which is how the brain responds to danger.
So, the crow's funeral actually has two meanings, one is to remember the area where the deceased was killed and avoid coming to the area in the future, and the other is to remember the murderer of his companion and attack violently in subsequent encounters.
At last
If we look at the crow's actions from the perspective of "funeral", we will think that the crow is a sentimental animal, and if we look at it from the perspective of "meeting", we will think that they are more rational.
But either way, it's undeniable that they're intelligent animals who can learn something from death.
We still have too many doubts about how animals treat death, African elephants will pass the bones of the dead to each other, smell and touch them with their noses; chimpanzees will clean the bones of corpses... We don't know what they're thinking or whether they're thinking about it.
Death is the impossible end point, and at the same time the fairest end point, and every creature has a different view of the problem.
Humans pay attention to mourning the dead, crows focus on admonishing the living, and some animals eat the corpses of their own kind when they are hungry, so there is no unified view on this issue among living things.