The first time I heard of animals who commit suicide was after a close encounter with the shanks, a type of primate, which is located in the Philippines.

These tiny impersonator of Yoda are nocturnal animals and detest the noise and human contact; suffering to find himself having to pose for selfies an endless queue of gentecome what I have done in a so-called refuge for tarsipu bring them to slam her head against the cage until they die.
Of course, I only found out after I went black.
And I felt terrible.
The tarsiers are not the only species prone to suicide.
The testimonies of animals who take their own lives are lost in time, with Aristotle, who wrote of the case of a stallion that had been thrown into an abyss after realizing that he had unknowingly coupled with his mother.
Since then, animal experts and the media were intrigued in the same way that scientists do not yet know what drives groups of healthy whales to beach themselves, and the lemmings have earned a place in popular culture by throwing himself into the mass already crags.
The modern fascination with the topic seems to have begun in Victorian England.
An article from London 1845 brings a dog that seems to be trying to drown himself.
After being rescued several times, he again rushed inside, and eventually held determinedly head underwater until his life is not extinct. An increasing number of reports are then circulated between 1870 and 1880: a duck that had drowned; a cat who had hanged himself from a branch after the death of the pups.
From a temporal perspective, examples seemed to revolve around the 'emerging idea that animals also have an inner life, and that therefore they should be spared pain and suffering.
There have been more recent cases of animals that presumably would be killed, especially after experiencing unspeakable cruelty at the hands of humans.
In 2011, China was reported that unorsa in captivity had stifled their pet and then killed herself, after the puppy had been subjected allinserimento, extremely painful, a catheter in the abdomen to extract the bile.
According to someone who claims to have witnessed the process of grotesque farm bile, and was mentioned on reminbao.com:
The bear mother escaped from its cage when she heard her pup howling with fear before a workman perforasse the stomach to milk the bile ... Unable to free the kitten from the chains, the mother hugged the little and eventually lha strangled.
Then he left the puppy and head race against a wall, killing himself.
The use of the term uncertain suicide in a scientific system because it requires to demonstrate the conscious desire to die of an animal, said Barbara King, anthropologist and author of How Animals Grieve [The sense of mourning in animals].
How can we reliably measure such a thing? he asks.
However, King points out that the case of the dolphin represents the most emblematic example of how the suicide is actually occurs in the animal kingdom.
He says it is well known that dolphins hold their breath until they die facing a certain death for hunting, or when they are cruelly taken prisoner.
The dolphins are 'breathing aware' and are extremely intelligent enough to be able to think in a complex way, so maybe suicide falls in their possibility of choice.
Dr. David Pena-Guzman of San Francisco State University has written extensively argument and believes that animals are capable of self-destructive behavior.
There is also evidence that animals have rich emotional life, he says, and experience negative emotions such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression, persistent grief and so on, which are commonly recognized as precursors of suicide.
Some pets, says Pena-Guzman, can actually die of grief when they lose the master, just as we are heartbroken when they die.
The animals whose human companions die can be devastated by the loss, he says.
In some cases, they sink into a depression so deep and so dark that you simply lose the will to live.
They stop eating and die.
However, Antonio Preti, University of Cagliari psychiatrist, thinks they're pretty humans to project their own specific type of pain on animals.
He told the BBC that these deaths of pets can be explained instead as the breaking of a social bond: The animal does not consciously choose to die; Instead, the animal was so accustomed to his master that does not accept more food to another individual.
Some animals seem suicidal behaviors that are tuttaltra thing, say other experts.
Get whales are social creatures, so when a group member gets sick and seeks refuge in shallow waters, the other following it.
I do not necessarily do so with the intention of ending their life.
Neither lemmings suicidanoquesta is an urban myth that we can blame Disney.
Lemmings choose to migrate in large groups when the population becomes too crowded and over-grazing the immediate surroundings.
They look for new habitats and might accidentally die in doing so, falling from a steep slope or drowning in a river.
Another bizarre example is spiders.
The spider mothers sometimes allow themselves to eat their young lives.
Not a suicide, per se, but a way to give their offspring the first nutritious meal, which helps to ensure their survival.
Although the scientific world there is a consensus that the animals can die by suicide, according to Pena-Guzman the study of animals allowed us to learn a lot about the suicide of humans.
Most of our knowledge about the human suicide, including knowledge of its causes, comes from deductions on the human suicide that come from animal research, he says.
This only makes sense if there are strong parallelismibiologici, neurological, psychological, cognitive and human and animal socialitra about suicide.
These parallels further support the idea that animals have what it takes to be able to commit suicide. "

From Vice