08/24/2026
Fascinating! I’ve experienced javelinas as trash-can- raiders and jack-o’-lantern destroyers… never knew they were such tender hearted little fellas. ☺️ You WILL encounter javelinas when you move to Sierra Vista. It’s a given.
In January 2017, eight-year-old Dante de Kort found a dead javelina (also called a collared peccary) in the woods behind his family's home in Prescott, Arizona. For his school science fair project, he set up the trail camera his grandparents had given him for his birthday. His plan was simple: film coyotes scavenging the body.
That's not what happened.
For the next ten days, the peccary's herd kept coming back. Members visited alone and in pairs, at all hours. They sniffed and nuzzled the body. They slept beside it, their bodies touching. One even wedged its snout underneath the carcass and pushed, again and again, as if trying to lift it back up. When coyotes showed up to scavenge, the herd chased them off, sometimes with two peccaries driving away five coyotes at once. Dante, who just wanted footage of predators, got frustrated watching them get chased away.
He didn't realize he was capturing something no one had ever recorded.
Collared peccaries live in close family groups, grooming each other and sharing scent glands so every member smells like part of the herd. That shared scent may be part of why they kept returning to their dead companion.
Biologist Mariana Altrichter of Prescott College saw Dante's footage at the science fair and recognized its value immediately. She partnered with him, and together they co-authored a peer-reviewed paper, published in the journal Ethology in 2017, documenting the first known case of this kind of prolonged, mourning-like behavior in collared peccaries. The researchers were careful not to claim the animals felt grief exactly as humans do — but they could prove the herd returned, touched, and protected their dead for ten straight days.
An eight-year-old with a birthday gift ended up co-authoring real science.
What do you think was driving the herd to keep coming back — memory, scent, something like grief, or something we don't have a word for yet?
Sources: National Geographic / Ethology (peer-reviewed journal)
This photo is used for illustrative purposes only.
