Squirrel Guards the Body of a Friend Who Got Run Over by a Car

Animals aren’t as different from people as we sometimes tend to think they are. They understand more than we give them credit for, and have more emotionally complex lives than we assume.

This is heartbreaking; this squirrel just lost his friend, who was hit by a car on the road. But this squirrel won’t let the crows have him just yet. He is reacting in grief for the loss of his friend. We usually think this kind of mourning as an exclusively human quality. It’s easy to assume that because animals look so different from us, or because they can’t speak our languages, that they don’t feel the same emotions.

But let this squirrel prove that old mythology wrong. Maybe if we can all start realizing that animals are as emotionally complex as we are, then we would take more seriously the times when human activity effects their lives.