How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  Loss of appetite, lethargy, and anxiety behaviors such as pacing and being “clingy” are the main changes for which a dog’s caretaker should watch. Offering a grieving dog a regular exercise regime, enrichment such as toys and treats, and renewed training to provide extra routine and structure, all may help. Drugs such as Elavil and Prozac, the magazine suggests, may be needed in severe cases.

  In tandem with exploring the sensitive emotional nature of dogs, we might ask some questions that depart from the scientific mainstream. Can dogs not only feel the death of a loved companion but somehow intuit when it is about to occur? Queries like this one are common among dog people, ranging from the sober-minded, “show me the evidence” types to those who embrace more inferential, “New Age” modes of thinking.

  A few years ago, a caller to a radio program I was on recounted how one night, her dog, a dachshund, became agitated, vocalizing and behaving in unusual ways. The next morning, the caller learned by telephone that one of the dog’s puppies—now living with another family—had died the previous night.

  Could the dachshund’s atypical behaviors be explained by some intuition of her pup’s death? How, short of telepathy (an ability about which I am acutely skeptical), could a dog possibly come by this knowledge? The mother was separated not only from her pup but also from any person who had knowledge of the death. Here we venture deep into contested territory. It’s a surprisingly popular claim that some dogs just “know things,” as when they predict with great precision (by their excited behavior) their owners’ return from work or travel. This precision holds, the claim goes, even when the return is unexpected or happens at an irregular time of day.

  Events videotaped by the researcher Rupert Sheldrake show that dogs really do behave with excited anticipation when their owners start toward home from a distant location. One camera recorded the movements of a British woman called Pat Smart, while a second recorded those of her dog, Jaytee. Even when Sheldrake’s researchers varied the timing of Smart’s movements and controlled for other factors that might have caused Jaytee to become excited, the dog, through his behavior, indicated an awareness of Smart’s setting off toward home. His alertness level shifted quickly and he began to look for Smart out the window. (For detailed analysis, see chapter 9 of my book Being with Animals).

  Even when confronted with evidence of this sort, I’m wary. How could I not be? Scientists aren’t much in the habit of accepting tales that rest on concepts uncomfortably close to animal ESP. Rigidly controlled research on more dogs is badly needed. And not only on dogs, either.

  Oscar is a cat who is said to predict when elderly people in a Rhode Island nursing home are about to die. When Oscar curls up on the bed of a sick resident, staff members telephone the family to say that their loved one’s death appears to be imminent—because the cat is just that reliable. David Dosa, the doctor who first described Oscar’s behavior in the New England Journal of Medicine, later wrote a book about this unusual phenomenon. Sometimes, given the age and poor health of the nursing home’s population, Oscar was forced to split his attention. If two residents neared death at about the same time, Oscar would stay with one till the end, then race on to the next. He wasn’t prone to lingering with the body. Though his presence did give comfort to the families of dying patients, his behavior centered not on expressing grief but on detecting the near approach of death.

  As Oscar makes clear, acute sensitivities in our pets are not confined to dogs. The explanation for Oscar’s death predictions lies, I believe, with the smell of molecules called ketones as they are released from a dying body. This medical explanation does not diminish the fact that Oscar is a remarkable animal; it may be that his nose is not unusual, but his unique way of responding to what he smells is.

  Our detour away from dog grief underscores the idea that domestic animals pay keen attention to what is happening around them. Yet just as not every smart cat is Oscar, not every dog mourns when confronted with death. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of making universality a criterion for the existence of a phenomenon—by which I mean, we shouldn’t require every dog to grieve in order to believe that some dogs do.

  An intriguing comment, made as part of another Web-based discussion of dog grief, illustrates this variability in behavior:

  When I had to have Number One Dog put to sleep, Number Two Dog went to the vet’s office too and was given an opportunity to see her best bud’s remains. She was decidedly not interested, and I felt like a bit of a fool for anthropomorphizing her. I have no idea whether she ever “got” death. In fact, I suspect she didn’t have a clue. The body she saw at the vet’s office wasn’t her lifelong friend; it was a thing she didn’t know.

  Perhaps some dogs simply lack the brainpower to make the connection between a dead body and a living, loved friend. I’m suspicious of this interpretation, however. Dog Two Number may well have been aware that the death had occurred, and may even have recognized the body, but nonetheless been indifferent to the other dog’s death. Indeed, the owner remarked, being the only dog was very much to Dog Number Two’s liking; this new status meant that she received more attention, and thus her life improved, a far more important outcome, for her, than the first dog’s death.

  Whether or not Dog Number Two recognized her late companion, reliable eyewitness reports strongly hint that some animals, from elephants to chimpanzees to bison, do recognize that a body represents, in changed form, a fellow animal who was once very much alive. We’ll come to these stories later in the book.

  Finally, a powerful photograph and accompanying tale about the actions of one Labrador retriever compel us to think hard about what mental connection dogs may make when a death occurs. In summer 2011, thirty American soldiers serving in Afghanistan were killed when the Tali-ban shot down their Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade. Amid this enormous tragedy, one dog caught the nation’s attention.

  Hawkeye was the dog of US Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson, age thirty-five, one of the soldiers to die in the helicopter crash. Hawkeye had been a constant presence in Tumilson’s life for years. When it came time for Tumilson’s funeral, held in a school gymnasium in Rockford, Iowa, and packed with fifteen hundred mourners, Hawkeye was included. In fact, he led the family down the aisle toward the flag-draped casket. When a close friend of Tumilson’s stood to eulogize the soldier, Hawkeye did something no one expected. He followed the friend to the front of the gym, lay down in front of the casket, and stayed there for the duration of the service. A photograph captured the solemnity of the occasion and the dog’s fixed presence at the coffin.

  Skeptics might offer alternative hypotheses to account for the dog’s choice of a position right in front of the casket: Maybe it was just a coincidence, a comfortable place to rest, and Hawkeye had no comprehension that his dearest friend occupied the casket.

  I prefer to take a second detour, around such objections. I am thinking instead about Hawkeye in the context of everything that we know about dog love, loyalty, and cognition, stretching back eighty years to the actions of a dog in Japan. I am reflecting upon Hawkeye’s love for Jon Tumilson. And following this route, I come to know something and know it to a certainty: Whether Hawkeye grasped that Tumilson was in the casket isn’t the key to understanding Hawkeye’s grief, or any dog’s grief.

  When loyal dogs grieve, for a person or for another dog, they grieve because they have loved.

  3

  MOURNING ON THE FARM

  Storm Warning was a beautiful thoroughbred with a challenging personality. So many things spooked the horse: umbrellas, bicycles, small dogs, ponies, even people who removed an item of clothing while riding him. Storm, as he was called, was just a bit neurotic. But he lucked out in one way: he enjoyed a fifteen-year close relationship with Mary Stapleton, who happens to be a psychologist. Acutely attuned to people’s fears and anxieties, Mary transferred her insights and calming abilities to the horse. Even as Mary and Storm competed in the dressage ring, they worked together on
Storm’s fears. In Mary’s words, Storm “learned to jump and face all of his terrors with great courage.”

  Then, one night when he was eighteen years old, tragedy struck. Storm had been turned out into a field at the farm where he lived in a herd with other geldings. An accident of some sort must have occurred, for in the morning, Storm was found to be severely injured. Examination revealed a compound fracture in his hind leg, too extensive for successful treatment. Right there in the field where he had spent his happiest days, Storm was put down. And right there he was buried.

  Horse people will recognize, Mary says, how unusual it is for a horse to be interred in the fields where he had lived. Mary still expresses gratitude to the farm’s owner for affording Storm such a burial.

  The evening after Storm’s death, Mary walked out into the field alone. Approaching the large mound that now covered the horse’s remains, she placed on the ground his favorite flowers—flowers he used to eat. “I heard the horses grazing around me,” Mary says, “and was, as always, comforted by their presence. Slowly, at least six of the group stood around the mound, stopped grazing, and looked at the grave. I realized we, the horses and I, had formed a circle around the fallen Storm.”

  To Mary, this event felt eerie, all the more so once she realized exactly who the encircling horses were: Storm’s companions, the geldings who were part of his herd. The geldings stood with lowered heads, which implied a straight-ahead gaze. “If horses hold their heads high,” Mary explained, “they are scanning far away. But Storm’s group clearly was at the right visual angle for looking directly at the burial site.” Other horses, nearby in the field but new to the farm and not part of Storm’s herd group, did not join the circle. None of the gathered horses ate the flowers Mary had placed on the grave, and she had brought no other treats. Whatever drew Storm’s companions to his burial place, it wasn’t the hope of food. In spontaneously forming a circle at his grave, Storm’s herdmates began a vigil of sorts; Mary found them still there the next morning. A cautious person, Mary acknowledges that many interpretations of this behavior are possible. “I choose to think,” she says, “that I was allowed to share a circle of mourning for our mutual, loved companion.”

  Mary’s story about Storm became a catalyst for me, as I was unfamiliar with horses either personally or in my work on animal emotion. To horse people, I soon found out, the notion of a horse circle, or indeed of equine grief, was anything but new.

  At one time, Janelle Helling managed a ranch in the Colorado mountains, with twenty or thirty horses in residence. One morning, the herd failed to make its way to the barn-corral area for feeding as it usually did. A mare had foaled during the night, and the newborn was too weak to stand. “The rest of the horses were circled around the mare and foal,” Janelle recalls, “and would not let us get near them. The horses refused to be herded away from acting as a barrier between us and the mare and foal.”

  That barrier was protective in nature. In that area of Colorado, mountain lion, bear, and coyote are indigenous, so perhaps the horses were hypervigilant for predators. But they clearly had people on their minds too. Only when Janelle arranged for a trailer to collect the mare and foal could the barrier be breached and the foal given proper medical attention. As the trailer bearing the mother and infant headed back to the barn, the other horses followed closely.

  The foal survived, so fortunately this anecdote does not qualify as a grief story. And this horse circle differed in character from the quiet, still, one that formed around Storm Warning’s grave. Here, the horses made a blur of motion, some moving clockwise, others counterclockwise. “Trotting, wheeling, kicking, galloping hoofed chaos,” Helling recalls. She is certain that no predator, or person, could have breached that moving circle. Could the protective intent of this horse circle suggest a new possibility in relation to the geldings who surrounded Storm Warning? Perhaps they had intuited a connection between Storm and the mound that had appeared in their field, and by encircling it they meant to protect that spot and thus Storm himself. Could the horses somehow have thought that Storm might reappear? Or were they in fact mourning him?

  The fact of the horse circle cannot in itself answer the question of what went on in Storm’s companions’ minds. But the anecdote does help to refute what some naysayers insist: that what we interpret as horse grief must instead express a feeling of vulnerability caused by separation from the herd. On this skeptical view, “grief” is an overstated claim, because the horses are only demonstrating the anxiety that besets a survivor in a herd-oriented species. Yet this “herd mentality” explanation doesn’t match up with what happened after Storm died. The surviving horses placed themselves in a specific configuration and expressed no agitation through their body language. Their group was intact, save one; they had no reason to feel vulnerable. Even though we cannot intuit precisely what the horses may have been feeling, it’s clear enough that something unusual was going on, beyond a concern for the self.

  Responding to an article on horse grief by Kenneth Marcella in Thoroughbred Times, a reader described the events that unfolded after her thoroughbred filly lost her companion. This other horse, Silver, had died suddenly, and his body was visible to the filly. While Silver was buried, she was turned into a separate field. When she later returned to the field they had shared, she stationed herself on top of the grave and pawed the ground. Indifferent to offers of food and companionship, coming in at night only when forced to do so, she persisted in her behavior for almost two weeks.

  Can the science of horse behavior help us understand this reaction? In his article, Marcella observes that an increase in horse longevity in the last fifteen years means that “equine buddies” now spend significantly longer periods of time together. Some horses who lose longtime friends may fall into outright depression. This is what happened with Tony and Pops, two workhorses who had known each in years past and met again at the time of their retirement. Once they rediscovered each other, these two were rarely apart. After Pops died, Tony lost weight, stopped interacting with other horses, and became lethargic enough that he lost muscle. His arthritis flared up.

  In the horse world, this situation is often diagnosed as depression and treated accordingly, with anything from extra attention from human companions to doses of Valium. For horses, depression may exacerbate physical ailments such as colic, so breaking the cycle of mourning, falling sick, and becoming more depressed is potentially urgent. The introduction of a new companion may help, just as we have seen with other animals. One Thoroughbred Times reader told of her horse, who mourned when his pasturemate of twenty-three years died. For two weeks he stood in a spot, under a favorite tree, that he had often shared with his friend. He would not eat. Only when a mare died during foaling, and he began to care for her orphan, did his behavior turn around.

  I’ve next to no personal experience with horses, beyond admiring their grace and intelligence—though I did, during a fourth-grade class outing, fall off a horse and still retain a memory of that long trip to the ground. Just as I remain impressed with the sheer size and power of horses, I have come to admire many horse people’s embrace of horse grief and their efforts to ease it. Marcella even highlights individual variation in grief behavior, which is consonant with cutting edge animal-behavior science. As with cats, dogs, and other animals, not all horses grieve when a companion dies; the continuum of reactions ranges from extreme depression, such as I’ve been describing, to apparent indifference.

  When a foal dies, some mares vocalize and act in an anxious manner. Others have little visible reaction. Given the strength of the mammalian mother-infant bond, I was at first surprised to learn that some horse mothers don’t grieve for their foals. But on second thought, it fit with my knowledge of other animals. Through her study of chimpanzees, Jane Goodall has expanded scientists’ thinking about the variable quality of maternal behavior. Caring, competent mothers exist side by side with indifferent, neglectful mothers among our closest living relatives—indeed, wit
hin our own species—so why not in other animals too? It’s possible, as well, that a mother who appears indifferent in the presence of her dead offspring may have been quite nurturing when the baby was alive, actively eliciting her care.

  One pattern does seem to hold for horses, according to experts in equine behavior. “Horses given the opportunity to interact with a dead pasture mate,” Marcella reports, “generally show less vocalization and anxiety and return to normal behavior more quickly.” It has become a common practice to ensure that surviving horses view the body of their dead companion, in the belief that this may help them cope. What is needed for the scientific investigation of horse grief and its amelioration is a database, compiled in a consistent and rigorous manner, of reports that demonstrate a full range of outcomes, from horses who are helped by viewing a companion’s body to those—like the filly who repeatedly pawed at her friend Silver’s grave even after viewing his body—who are not.

  Laying out the body for viewing by animals at risk for grief is an increasingly popular practice in other contexts as well. In zoos and private homes, and on farms, it’s adopted by people who know that animals grieve and who want to ease that grief. It’s a strategy that seemed to work with a goat named Myrtle. Myrtle knew her own mind. Adopted into a home in Colorado, she repeatedly escaped into a neighbor’s yard where she could be with the only remotely goatlike animals nearby—horses. Again and again, she was brought back home, only to escape again. Finally, the wayward goat was allowed to stay where she clearly wanted to be, at the neighbor’s house.

  Janelle Helling, who described the horses’ protective circle around a newborn foal, was the horse-owning neighbor in question. She decided that Myrtle deserved the opportunity to enjoy the companionship not only of horses but of other goats. She confesses that it wasn’t a decision reached solely out of compassion for a lonely goat; there was also the matter of Myrtle’s wanderlust. Whenever Janelle rode a horse off her property, Myrtle would trot behind. This wasn’t safe, given local traffic. So Janelle adopted a goat called Blondie, hoping that Myrtle might take to her and that the two goats might become homebodies together.