Dogs May Grieve the Deaths of Canine Companions

Tim Dawson, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

To assess grief in pet dogs and their owners, researchers conducted a survey of people who had owned at least two dogs, one of whom died while the other was still alive. They found that both a friendly relationship between the two dogs and the owner’s grief increased the likeliness of negative behavioral changes in surviving dogs. The researchers say that negative behavioral and emotional changes observed in surviving dogs could be due to both a grief-like reaction in response to the loss of their companion and a reaction to the grief of their owners.

Read the story at my Animal Minds blog: Dogs May Grieve the Deaths of Canine Companions.