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I think the collisions are accidents, but an animal can pine until it dies.

Most of them are probably accidents but some animals willingly bite the big one, usually as a mating thing. There's a certain spider that allows himself to be eaten by the female after mating and certain preying mantises can't mate until their head is taken off. Whether or not they know of their own impending doom is debatable but all creatures have a survival instinct that precludes suicide. Humans, with their complex brain and all of the things that can go wrong with it, like clinical depression and dementia, seem to be the only creatures that will plan and carry out their own end.

Accident. Whales though, they are a mystery. Very intelligent, so i dont know, im certain there is a reason they beach themselves.

Yes, animals can commit suicide. Scientists find whales that purposely beach themselves and killer whales that starve themselves when seperated from their mates.

Well, some actions of animals (just like humans) do seemingly dumb things out of ignorance of what is to come. Sometimes, similar to a cult, animals will purposely kill themselves.

It's hard to discern the intent of animals who can't describe their intent to us (or, in the instance of many parrots and a few trained apes, can, but poorly).

But I know of one type of occurrence which is, nearly inarguably, intentional suicide. It's called Quaker Mutilation Syndrome, where a Quaker parrot goes beyond the common problem of feather plucking to mutilation of its own flesh. Birds affected by QMS will tear into their own flesh until they hit a major blood vessel and bleed out.

QMS has many causes, many of which are physical in nature (of course many human suicides are caused by physical suffering). But QMS is also associated with psychological causes, and in such a context it looks very much like suicide caused by mental illness. QMS in fact has been treated with the human depression drug Prozac.

I would not be surprised to learn that other animals, and especially other highly intelligent animals (apes, cetaceans, parrots, crows) engage in behaviors which appears similar to suicide. We humans have an exaggerated sense of our own specialness. But we're just an upright hairless ape, closely related by DNA and the fossil record to our cousin the chimpanzee. Our technology may cause us to sustain a higher rate of suicide, by allowing individuals with a genetic predisposition to depression to reproduce and pass on that predisposition (in the wild, a depressed animal might well starve to death or fail to react in time to avoid a predator before ever having a chance to mate). But I doubt that the mental processes we engage in prior to attempting suicide involve any physical structures unique to us.

Yes, some of the parrots twisted their neck if they're starving and left with no food in their cage..also, the tarseir twisted their neck if they don't want to be touched.

lol nice theory but

whales Beach them selves by accident when feeding on seals

and squirrels and birds and pure accident

animals don't reason to kill them selves they reason to survive

i think it would be by accedent!

well..... hopefully!

i love animals!!!