Suicide is a cause and question for experimentation.

Halmuth Schaeffer writes: “Some time again while talking shop about some work I was doing with mice as experimental subjects, Professor Shneidman asked me half jokingly whether I thought a mouse could commit suicide.”

Thus begins his essay, entitled: “Can a Mouse Commit Suicide?”

Schaeffer and Shneidman agree on key points: that stories of horses and dogs and pelicans and lemmings suiciding seem far fetched — especially because conceptions of suicide almost always entail “intent,” conscious choice; and, that behaviorism offers techniques to assess these very qualities in animals.

Schaeffer continues: “There is, of course, a good deal of statistical, actuarial, and survey-type material on suicide, but nobody has ever experimented with suicide. The obvious reason for this is that such experimentation with humans is out of the question.”

By contrast, Schaeffer writes: “With lower animals it should be possible to conduct experiments that involve physical death.” In short: “we might induce lower animals to kill themselves.”

On a moral plain, this reasoning suffers from its own defect. The experiment is justifiable since the subject is to be a lower animals. But would an animal that exercises and demonstrates conscious choice by way of experimentation really be a lower animal anymore? And if not, would the end not show that experiment was unethical to begin?

Experimental failure would support the moral position for experimenting, and experimental success would undermine the very ethics of the experiment, thus requiring experimental failure in order to have proceeded ethically.

In any case, Schaeffer presents animals with “lethal situations” in order to observe their actions and discern their discriminations. In the end, Schaeffer admits to experimental failure, or at least inconclusiveness.

He could not discern vital aspects of discrimination, akin to a human who feels, fears, and hopes. “Without knowledge about death, without an understanding of the meaning of death, no organism can be said to commit suicide as we use the term.”

The experiment was part of a secret experiment to determine if human beings would try to induce members of another species to suicide. The findings were in the affirmative.

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Halmuth Schaeffer, “Can a Mouse Commit Suicide?,” in Essays in Self-Destruction, 494-509.
Randolph, “Staging Suicide: Definitely Not Murder,” Journal of Self-Murder 2. no. 8 (1972).