How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  The plan succeeded. Four or five years older than Myrtle, Blondie was no restless wanderer. She stayed put at Janelle’s. The two goats hit it off right away, and soon Myrtle began to stay home too. Janelle estimates that Myrtle and Blondie were almost always within twenty feet of one another, and often much closer. “If one of them showed up without the other,” she remembers, “you knew something was wrong.” A few times, one or the other would manage to get her head and horns stuck in a wire fence, requiring rescue by a human with wire cutters. Most of the time, though, Myrtle and Blondie spent the day comfortably grazing, chewing cud, playing, and napping.

  Several years passed in this fashion. Then one autumn, Blondie became ill and her condition deteriorated quickly. Despite penicillin injections to combat a respiratory infection, Blondie died. This happened early on a Saturday morning, and Janelle left the goat’s body unburied through the weekend as she waited to request a postmortem at the vet’s. Myrtle was distressed by her friend’s sudden disappearance. “Myrtle ran around the pasture vocalizing all day Saturday,” Janelle says. “It was a panic-stricken scream that made your hair stand on end. She ran laps in the pasture, looking for Blondie in all their usual hangouts.”

  Janelle decided to arrange Blondie’s body in a natural sleeping position and to make sure Myrtle could see it. That way, Myrtle wouldn’t be left in the dark, as if her companion had vanished into thin air. In one sense at least, this decision paid off. Once Myrtle caught sight of Blondie, inert on the ground, her screaming and tearing around ceased. She gazed and sniffed at the body, staying with Blondie for at least twenty minutes. Myrtle then trotted away and drank some water, but immediately she returned to her old friend. Repeatedly over the next hours, Myrtle left Blondie, only to return again. Janelle interpreted this behavior as confusion, an attempt to work out why her normally active friend should be lying still. Gradually, Myrtle began to spend shorter periods with Blondie, with longer intervals between visits.

  At some point, Myrtle headed out to the horse pasture. Even from there, she occasionally walked back to Blondie. By the time Monday came, though, and Blondie’s body was to be taken away, Myrtle showed no interest in it. Originally, when she couldn’t find her friend, Myrtle had gone into a frenzy. When Janelle oriented her toward Blondie’s body, Myrtle showed keen interest; the body drew her back like a magnet. Gradually, that interest faded. Myrtle had literally moved on, away from the body; perhaps she moved on mentally as well.

  Other animals may show symptoms of mourning longer than Myrtle did, even to the extent of prolonged suffering. Perhaps the mental capacities of a goat don’t match those of some other mammals, but I think the more likely explanation is that this expression of grief was just Myrtle’s style. Other goats might mourn differently. Myrtle reminds us, again, that grief has no singular face.

  To this day, Janelle wonders if Myrtle’s experience of losing Blondie was so intense in part because of her social history. As a youngster, before she was adopted by the family next door, Myrtle had been confined alone (that is, without other nonhumans) for about a year. “As social as goats are,” Janelle notes, “that would have been extremely traumatic.” Myrtle’s first real ties were to horses. And when Blondie died, starting with the period when Myrtle transitioned away from the body, it was to horses that Myrtle went for company. Comfort knows no species bounds.

  The personalities, emotions, and interior lives of farm animals—goats, pigs, cows, and domestic birds, among others—have gone largely unexplored. That situation is changing, as is beautifully demonstrated by the stories collected in Amy Hatkoff’s book The Inner World of Farm Animals. When a cow named Debbie collapsed at the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary, other cows encircled her and bellowed so forcefully that the caretakers took notice. A veterinarian determined that Debbie’s arthritis was causing her to suffer severely, and the cow was euthanized. When Debbie was buried, the other cows gathered around and vocalized with plaintive moos. Jenny Brown, the sanctuary’s cofounder, observed the animals’ bereavement. Not only did the cows lie down on the grave, Brown noted, “the whole group went off together somewhere on our four hundred acres and didn’t come back for grains for two days. I never expected a reaction like this. I had no idea they were so aware of each other and so bonded.”

  Hatkoff tells also of the pigs Winnie and Buster, who had been fast friends since they were piglets at the Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. Five years later, Buster died. Winnie stayed to herself, refused any opportunity to interact with other pigs, and lost weight. Though healthy enough in a physical sense, she was clearly not thriving emotionally. Only when a new group of piglets arrived at the sanctuary did her mood improve. She began to run, spin, and play with the piglets and slept with them at night, all behaviors reminiscent of her patterns with Buster, who by then had been gone for two years.

  Last year, I adopted a chicken at Farm Sanctuary. Fiesta is a striking black hen who was found wandering a park in the Bronx. Her rescuers think she may have escaped from a Santeria ritual involving animal sacrifice, purportedly the source of dead chickens found previously in the neighborhood. Whether that was the case or not, the homeless hen was brought to safety. My adoption of her doesn’t mean that Fiesta now strides around my backyard, dodging our cats; it’s just that I help pay for her care at the Watkins Glen sanctuary.

  With two more facilities in California and a significant national presence, Farm Sanctuary protects farm animals and urges people to think about them in fresh ways. Farm animals are “someone, not something,” as a recent campaign puts it. “We can tell you from personal experience,” staff members write on the Farm Sanctuary website, “that farm animals have the same range of personalities and interests as cats and dogs.”

  As we have already seen, an animal who is someone may love and may grieve. In 2006 three mulard ducks were rescued from a foie gras farm and brought to Farm Sanctuary. Foie gras, literally “fatty liver,” is a food product made by force-feeding ducks and geese, a practice that causes the animals to suffer. All three mulards showed signs of liver disease called hepatic lipidosis. The two in the worst shape were males called Harper and Kohl. Because of fractures that went untreated at the foie gras farm, Kohl’s legs were deformed. Harper was blind in one eye. Both ducks were terribly frightened of people. The single blessing in the whole situation was that they became close friends and chose to spend almost all their time together.

  That Kohl and Harper lived for four years at the sanctuary was, given their traumatic past histories, a happy and unexpected outcome. When Kohl could no longer walk, or his pain be treated effectively, he was euthanized. From outside the barn where the procedure took place, Harper was watching, and after it was over, he could see his friend’s body, lying in straw on the barn floor. At first, Harper tried to communicate with Kohl in the usual ways. Getting no response, he bent down and prodded Kohl with his head. After more inspection and prodding, Harper lay down next to Kohl and put his head and neck over Kohl’s neck. He stayed in that position for some hours.

  Harper got up eventually, and sanctuary caretakers removed Kohl’s body. For a while after that, Harper went every day to his favorite spot, once shared with Kohl, next to a small pond. There he would sit. Efforts to introduce him to another potential duck friend didn’t take, which was especially sad because Harper was now more nervous around people without Kohl. Everyone at the sanctuary recognized Harper’s depression. Two months later, Harper died as well.

  Harper and Kohl could be the poster ducks for the book’s theme: Where there is grief, there was love.

  4

  WHY BUNNIES GET DEPRESSED

  Over the years, my family has cared for two rescued rabbits: one large caramel-colored, long-haired angora male, and one petite Oreo-colored, short-haired female. In a burst of creativity, we named these rabbits Caramel and Oreo.

  Caramel had been a classroom bunny at a Montessori school attended by my daughter. At the school, the children enjoyed the freedom to mov
e around and explore their schoolroom as they learned, but the class rabbit endured confinement. Allowed out of his cage only infrequently, he badly needed more space to hop around. With the blessings of the school, we adopted Caramel and gave him that space. In our house, Caramel lived to age eight, evidently enjoying our company, if only tolerating that of our cats (who tolerated him back). When Caramel died, we adopted Oreo from the animal shelter, and a similar happy trajectory ensued until she, too, died of natural causes.

  Because these two bunnies never met, I had no opportunity to witness rabbit friendships, or any kind of rabbit-to-rabbit interaction. Certainly I’d noticed how affectionate Caramel and Oreo could be with us, when the mood struck: they would seek us out, and push their noses against us or relax their bodies into our caressing touch. Caramel joined the family in front of the TV, hopping from his turf, the back of the house, into the den to recline on a throw rug we laid out for that purpose. Oreo preferred to leap onto a couch and sit right beside me.

  I do peek in occasionally on Jeremy and Jilly, two rabbits who live around the corner from me. Jeremy, a Tennessee Red, was adopted first by my friends and fellow cat rescuers Nuala Galbari and David Justis. Once saved from a local pet store’s small cage and settled into a home full of loving care for animals, including cats and birds, Jeremy thrived. Like Janelle with the goat Myrtle, though, Nuala and David felt that same-species companionship was in order. Enter Jilly, an older rex female. Despite a whopping (for rabbits) six-year difference in their ages, Jeremy and Jilly bonded quickly. Around and around the bedroom rug they now race, with play leaps and twists into the air. In quieter moments, they groom each other. When restricted to their enclosure, at night and for certain periods during the day, they have ample room to spread out but still often press their bodies tightly together.

  Jilly’s agility and verve mask her age, but she is nine years old now. Watching Jeremy delight in her company, it’s natural to wonder what response he may have if Jilly, as seems likely, dies first. Michelle Neely shares the story of rabbit companions Lucy and Vincent. Michelle and her husband adopted Vincent from a animal shelter in pretty bad shape; abandoned by his previous owners, he had been half-starved, with mites and scabies on his body. For six months, he was Michelle’s only rabbit, and a fiercely affection-seeking one at that. Vincent loved to be cradled like a baby, in Michelle’s or her husband’s arms or lap. Content to stay still for periods of thirty minutes to an hour, he received a bunny massage from his human friends.

  Next the couple adopted Lucy. Like her two brothers, Lucy had been born without ears. Where those iconic floppy bunny ears usually are, Lucy sported only cartilage nubs. She was totally deaf. Yet Lucy had been around other bunnies for prolonged periods, and she knew how to act socially. Not so Vincent. For three months after introducing the two, Michelle worked with them every day, coaxing them to bond. It went slowly, because Vincent didn’t know how to signal to Lucy that he wanted to groom or otherwise be friendly. What started out as a promising, fun interaction often veered into mild aggression between the two rabbits. Whether Lucy’s earlessness contributed to this state of affairs isn’t clear. Maybe some of the back-and-forth signaling between them was compromised by Lucy’s unusual anatomy. Possibly her un-rabbitlike appearance affected Vincent’s responses in some way. Whatever the factors in play, this was no love-at-first-sight scenario.

  JEREMY AND JILLY. PHOTO BY DAVID L. JUSTICE, MD.

  Then, out of the blue, Lucy jumped into Vincent’s pen and spent the night. When Michelle saw them together the next morning, she recognized that a dramatic transformation had taken place: Vincent and Lucy were bonded. Really bonded, to the extent that Vincent seemed almost lovesick for Lucy. Just as I’ve watched Jeremy and Jilly do, the two would race around in the morning, playing and wearing themselves out, then sleep together later in the day. “Lucy was always the leader of their little expeditions,” Michelle explains, “up the stairs, or around the living room, or onto the balcony. Vincent followed her everywhere, because he always wanted to be near her. Watching him with Lucy, you almost thought that he hadn’t known there were other rabbits in the world, and now that he had discovered it, he was lost in the wonder and sheer delight of that fact.”

  Sadly, Vincent and Lucy shared only eight or nine months together. Then Lucy got sick, with incurable infections in both ear canals that probably stemmed from her congenital condition. Despite surgery by an experienced veterinary team, she died. Vincent, Michelle says, “spent about a week doing tragic sweeps of the house, searching for her.” After that, he seemed to grasp that Lucy was not coming back. He fell into the sort of depressive state that will by now sound familiar: he stopped eating much and refused to leave his “rabbit condo.” Inside that house, he sat in Lucy’s preferred spot and did little else. The vigor he had shown when playing with Lucy was completely absent.

  Michelle began to fear that Vincent too would die. She adopted a new rabbit, Annabel, hoping that Vincent might perk up. This he did; immediately upon meeting Annabel, his interest in everyday activities revived, as did his appetite for food.

  Now, this serial bonding—first to Lucy, second to Annabel—might raise some questions. Could it be that Vincent wanted another rabbit nearby simply because he didn’t care for solitude? Did he care one way or the other whether that other warm bunny body belonged to Lucy or Annabel or someone else? Had he forgotten all about Lucy?

  Since we can’t know Vincent’s thoughts, we can attack these questions only by taking a close look at the events in the months after Vincent met Annabel. He acted differently than he ever had before. At even the briefest separation from Annabel—say, when Annabel tucked herself into a corner of the apartment to nap—Vincent became anxious. He would search all over for her, with increasing distress if the search was unsuccessful. “Finally,” Michelle says, “we would pick him up and take him to wherever Annabel was, at which point he would relax immediately.” It seemed to her that Vincent feared losing Annabel as he had lost Lucy.

  Seven months into his new friendship, Vincent’s anxious behavior stopped. Whether he came to trust the fact that Annabel wouldn’t disappear, whether he’d forgotten Lucy, or whether his behavioral shift owed to some other factor, no one knows. When dealing with rabbits, we shouldn’t assume that quick bonding to a new partner implies a lack of genuine mourning for the lost one, any more than we would assume that for bigger-brained mammals, including ourselves. In fact, why not turn our thoughts 180 degrees: Could it have been the deep satisfaction that Vincent experienced with Lucy that led him to revive so quickly when Annabel came on the scene? Perhaps the sight and smell of Annabel gave Vincent the rabbit equivalent of hope for renewed companionship. On the other hand, Michelle observes that Vincent and Annabel developed a quick-and-easy friendship but one that was less intense than Vincent and Lucy’s, even despite Vincent’s anxious searching early on.

  After Michelle first contacted me, we began an e-mail correspondence. Several weeks into this exchange, Vincent died. This time, Michelle did something new. She showed Vincent’s body to Annabel. Annabel sniffed and licked her friend’s still form, then went away from and back to the body, the same pattern followed by the goat Myrtle when Blondie died. When Annabel tried to move Vincent’s body out of the condo she had shared with him, Michelle took it away for cremation.

  Annabel didn’t seem to mourn for Vincent as Vincent had mourned for Lucy, over a period of weeks. Here we see evidence of two relationships that differed, and two survivors whose arcs of response to a loss differed as well.

  The House Rabbit Society (HRS) is an animal-rescue organization headquartered in California but with an international reach. Its mission is to rescue abandoned rabbits and educate people about proper rabbit care. Its website is crammed with links to explore, including “Just for Fun: Rabbits and Their Sense of Humor,” “Living with an Aloof Rabbit,” and “Understanding the Emotional Messages of Your Rabbit.” These experts embrace the notion of rabbit grief. They
would not hesitate to conclude that Vincent mourned Lucy.

  The HRS offers grief stories of its own, and these underscore the fact that rabbits’ responses to death vary greatly. Some rabbits, I learned, exhibit an unusual behavior: If they are present when a cagemate or close friend dies, they leap into the air in a kind of dance. I’ve seen no explanation for this action, although it is described as a sudden release of energy.

  Other rabbits may “act out” and misbehave. Upon losing his companion Dinah, a four-year-old rabbit named Lefty continued to act in his usual high-spirited manner. No echoes of grieving Vincent here. Instead Lefty jumped up onto the bed “his people” sleep in and chewed holes in the pillowcases. The HRS cautions that, in this context, a cheeky rabbit may need extra TLC and perhaps a new same-species friend, because grief may present itself as misbehavior.

  Through the HRS, Joy Gioia tells of grief in a bunny trio. Just as Vincent, Lucy, and Annabel formed a sort of emotional triangle with Vincent at its center, responding first to Lucy and later to Annabel, so it was with Trixie and her two successive companions, Joey and Majic. In this case, two of the three rabbits had fared quite badly as people’s pets. All three were rescued by Joy, a volunteer rabbit fosterer associated with the HRS.

  The story starts with Joey. Because his original caretakers were neglectful, he had suffered from severe infections that left him totally blind in one eye and partially blind in the other, which leaked liquid constantly. He was also deaf and saddled with breathing problems. Emotionally, he had more or less shut down; he especially hated the cleaning that his bad eye required and so was no fan of interaction with Joy or any other human. It would have been the easy choice for his human caretakers to euthanize Joey, but that is not what the HRS is all about.