In order to feel grief, one must also feel love. Most likely, you just read that sentence and thought it so uncontroversial as to be absurd. But now imagine that the “one” under discussion is a… goat? How about a chicken, or a cat? Now, what do you think about that statement?
In her book, How Animals Grieve, anthropologist and author Barbara J. King explores a multitude of anecdotes about animals that appear, to human eyes, to experience what we know as grief. Cats who keen for recently deceased siblings. Goats who search frantically for missing goat-friends. Horses who encircle the exact patch of land where their herd mate was buried in a pasture. An emotionally insecure elephant who leaves her beloved security object, a tire, on the body of her beloved dog companion. These intriguing stories, and many more, form the core of King’s exploration of how individual animals grieve over lost relatives and companions.
It’s deeply telling that King, who is a practicing anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, titled her book How Animals Grieve (emphasis mine), rather than asking: Do Animals Grieve? From the beginning, it’s clear she believes some animals experience grief, in ways that are different from how we understand grief to be, though still recognizably within the realm of sadness, depression, and a deep awareness of the loss of something or someone near and dear.
Scientists typically caution against interpreting animal behaviors within the suite of our human behaviors and emotions. Anthropomorphism, as it’s called, is viewed as a big no-no. Biologists and experimental animal behaviorists tend to view anthropomorphism as folksy, unprofessional and even flat-out wrong. But recently, a case is being made that the scientific community has gone too far in disallowing themselves to interpret animal emotions in relation to our own. (After all, if you go back far enough, we evolved from a common animal ancestor.) King writes, “The skpetics have a point: rather than accept uncritically the existence of animal grief, or animal love, or any other complex emotion in non-human animals, we should first weigh other, simpler explanations.” This is exactly what King does throughout the book as she recounts anecdotes of how surviving animals behaved after losing a sibling or close companion; Continue reading