Acknowledging that animals mourn and grieve their losses opens up new implications for animal welfare and rights.

Like humans, many other animals have been known to grieve the losses of other members of their groups. This grieving is more obvious for some animals than for others, but it has been observed in a wide range of species. Many observations of animal grieving have been made anecdotally at sanctuaries, zoos, and homes, and there is also some peer reviewed scientific literature that looks at the phenomenon. In this article, which is a summation of the book How Animals Grieve by the same author, looks at what animal grieving is, how we can recognize it, and what it means. The author notes the importance of visible expressions of grief because visibility “helps to counter charges of anthropomorphism that may be brought to bear upon claims of animal emotion and animal thinking.” That being said, this does not mean that all grief is visible.

One of the main things that the author emphasizes in the summary is that the study of animal grief is still in its infancy. We certainly don’t “understand patterns of grief well enough to predict (by species, population, or individual) when it is or is not likely to occur.” Grief is a subjective experience. The author also notes that human grieving is different and our mourning rituals “put a premium on community, language, and technology-based responses to death.” That means our grieving is more visible (to us), but not necessarily more severe. Overall, the author urges us to open our minds to the grief of other animals and to recognize that other animals “grieve because they have loved.” For animal advocates, this study of animal grieving helps us to further place the beings we are fighting for in a context where other people might recognize their suffering.