Do animals have a spiritual awareness of death?

I DO believe that cats might have some religious reverence (Mail). I’ve kept cats for most of my life, and when they die, they’re buried in the garden. At one time I had three cats, but one died. One of the survivors spent a long time looking for her lost companion, but the other survivor had watched me digging the grave and saw the wrapped-up corpse’s tail, which was distinctively striped. He clearly recognised it and, when I moved away, went to the grave. I feared he might dig her up but instead he systematically sniffed the ground around it and then slowly rolled himself all over the grave in an extravagant and unusual way for quite a long time, spreading scent from his cheek glands all over it. Then he got up, looked at the grave intently, and walked away. While the other cat went on looking for the missing one, he never did. A few days later, I found the other cat curled up on the grave, after which she, too, stopped searching. It really seemed to me that the unusual rolling ritual was for one cat the farewell acceptance of loss, and that he had communicated this later to the other one, who had then also accepted it.

CAROLA MORTON, Hereford.

THE reason chimpanzees pummel trees with rocks and build cairns of stones (Mail) has nothing to do with their adopting religion, and quoting the old chestnut about our sharing 98 per cent of our DNA with them merely adds a bogus intellectual veneer to a specious argument. if religious beliefs were genetic (they aren’t — they’re cultural, learned from parents or peers), we would share our parents’ spirituality, something we clearly do not. it’s more likely the chimps are pounding the trees to scare out burrowing insects, an important part of their diet, after blocking their usual exit holes with mounds of stones.

ANGUS GAFRAIDH, London E11.