Suicide is distinctly human since only human beings suicide.

Animals do not suicide.

In Suicide: A Social and Historical Study, Henri Fedden determines that “the question of animal suicide is doubtful.” Fedden state: “We must remember that extinction is a concept which animals do not have, and that death which is the result of the cessation of a voluntary act (for instance feeding) is not necessarily volitional.”[2]

Fedden reports that “monkeys, notably devoid of principle, have cut their throats with razors.” He concludes, however: “this [is] due to the imitation of men shaving, seems simply to have been an unfortunate death.”[3]

Minois concurs, stating that animal suicide is “in the realm of myth; humankind alone is capable of reflecting on its own existence and deciding to prolong life or put an end to it.” [4]

Suicide is distinctly human since only human beings suicide. Like animals, gods do not suicide.

In The Natural History, Pliny declares that suicide sets us apart from God for God cannot suicide, “even if he wishes.” No, suicide is the “supreme boon that he has bestowed on man among all the penalties of life.”[3] For how can the indestructible destroy itself? Why would perfection wish to do so?

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[1] Henri Fedden, Suicide: A Social and Historical Study, 11-12.
[2] Minois, History of Suicide.
[3] Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2.5.

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Just as obvious and encompassing is human hunger as the we could do without which of, as and against human life in the sense of human hungers being the not without which of human suffering and destruction that we could or should do without so as to better survive and thrive and propagate our own.

Simply recall all you know of the sweep of human aims and actions and experiences as human hungers that consume human beings as very instances of human beings hungering and feeding on the course of human history, and then look to hungers and consumings and deprivations and deprivations and starvations in everyday life within and all around to know that this is absolutely true. We could all too often do without these human hunger in aim and measure and method and kind.

And so the story of human life is the story of human hunger to survive and to thrive and to propagate for and against which there is human hunger that simply consumes human life according to its own hungers in service of human life and this is the problem of human life as human hunger in humans consuming humans, individuals and societies, societies and species, as both good and bad, right and wrong, pleasure and pain, nourishing and extinguishing, life or death, us and them, such that these are often one in the same and infinitely different depending on the human feeding and the human being fed upon. Some call this the story of the human condition knowing that the story is horrifying to behold.