Rag-Dog

Healthy Dogs, Breeds & Training

Menu
  • Home
  • DOGS BREEDS
  • DOGS INSURANCE
  • DOGS HEALTH
  • DOGS TRAINING
  • DOGS NEWS
  • Cookie Policy
  • About Us
  • DCMA
  • Contact Us
  • Terms and Conditions 
  • Privacy Policy
Menu

Dogs Feel Grief When Canine Companion Dies | Health

Posted on February 24, 2022 by admin

THURSDAY, Feb. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Anyone who has more than one dog might have seen it unfold: A beloved pet dies, and the remaining dog seems to suffer as deeply as the rest of the family.

Now, new Italian research adds to evidence that man’s best friend does indeed mourn such a loss.

Eighty-six percent of 426 dog owners who had lost one of their animals said their surviving dog went on to display negative behavioral changes for months. Those changes included playing and eating less, sleeping more, becoming more fearful, and tending to whine and bark more often.

But does this all add up to canine grief?

“Overall, demonstration of grief in non-human animals is one of the biggest challenges facing science,” acknowledged study author Dr. Federica Pirrone. She’s a lecturer of veterinary ethology and animal welfare in the department of veterinary medicine and animal science at the University of Milan.

Pirrone noted that “other social species — such as great apes, whales, dolphins, elephants and birds — have been described to engage in death rituals in which one could see the expression of grief.”

But “emotions, particularly complex emotions like grief, are still a shady, and thus intriguing, side of the lives of domestic dogs,” she said. “At least for us humans.”

To gain better insight into canine grief, the study team administered a questionnaire to 384 women and 42 men who had lost a dog relatively recently.

On average, the dogs who died had been in the owner’s household for nearly 10 years, and in just over half the cases their death happened unexpectedly.

More than 9 in 10 said their surviving dog had lived with the dog who had died for at least a year, and many said that activity sharing was common: two-thirds of the dogs had slept together; more than a quarter had groomed each other; half had played with each other; and more than half (54%) had never fought. Just over a third also shared their food, nearly 60% shared their toys, and 86% shared resting areas.

After one dog died, behavior changes were common among the surviving dogs, the team found, with only about 13% of owners seeing no changes in habits.

For example, attention-seeking shot up among two-thirds of surviving dogs, while 57% started to play less often. Overall activity levels dropped among 46% of dogs, with roughly a third tending to sleep more, eat less and/or be more fearful. Three in 10 dogs barked and whined more.

The team did find that the risk for behavior changes went up the more an owner grieved.

In the study, “the level of fear in the surviving dog was positively correlated with [the] owners’ level of suffering, anger and psychological trauma,” Pirrone said.

The findings were published Feb. 24 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Patricia McConnell, a certified applied animal behaviorist, reviewed the findings and thinks all the changes cited in the study do, in fact, add up to expressions of canine grief.

“I’m gratified that the study was done, because it frankly seems impossible that dogs wouldn’t grieve,” McConnell said. “They are highly social, some of the most social mammals in the world. And as mammals, they share much of the same neurobiology and physiology that drives our own emotions.”

What should you do if one of your dogs dies?

Pirrone advised maintaining routines and staying close to the surviving dog, to “make them feel protected.”

But McConnell cautioned that — as with human grief — there’s no quick “fix.”

In advice she shares online, McConnell encourages owners to give themselves the space to grieve as well, even while knowing that “dogs can be extremely sensitive to your suffering and feel powerless to ‘fix’ it themselves.”

McConnell also suggests spending time “talking” to your dog to maintain a connection, while also striving to follow a blend of old daily routines and new stimulating activities.

But in the end, she said, “dogs need something similar to what we need: gentleness, caring concern and time, time, time.”

More information

There’s more on human-pet relations at US Department of Health and Human Services.

SOURCES: Federica Pirrone, DVM, PhD, lecturer, veterinary ethology and animal welfare, department of veterinary medicine and animal science, University of Milan; Patricia McConnell, PhD; certified applied animal behaviorist and expert, companion animal behavior and the biology and philosophy of human/animal relationships, and adjunct professor, zoology, University of Wisconsin-Madison; ScientificReports, Feb. 24, 2022

.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • How To Teach Your Dog Recall: 6 Do’s And Don’ts
  • Belgian Shepherd Socio joins Stephen Tindall to take on the world at the IGP FMBB World Championships
  • Pet Insurance Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report
  • Sophie Wessex melts hearts as she bonds with dogs during key engagement ‘True dog lover’ | Royal | News
  • Old English Sheepdogs: Facts, Personality, Temperament

Recent Comments

No comments to show.

Tag Cloud

animal animals Business condoms consumer news coronavirus covid-19 dailymail dcc dcclm dementia dog dogs Entertainment femail food insecurity genetics health Insurance local London medicine News New South Wales opioids owner Pet Pet Care and Services pet insurance pets pets & animals Pets Insurance politics poverty Research Research and Markets sexy Sport standard sydney training veterinarian Viagra wire zoology

Archives

  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022

Categories

  • DOGS BREEDS
  • DOGS HEALTH
  • DOGS INSURANCE
  • DOGS NEWS
  • DOGS TRAINING
©2022 Rag-Dog | Design: Newspaperly WordPress Theme
Manage Cookie Consent
we use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}