INTRODUCTION

Grieving for an Animal Is What Makes Us Human Animals


Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.

—JOHN GALSWORTHY

It is a disorienting and odd feeling to have loved a dog or cat or another animal for so long, and suddenly realize that the end is approaching. This is such a complex feeling that we endure: the knowledge that a period in our life has come to an end; that the animal we have so loved and who has been such an important part of our everyday life, is about to leave us; that soon all we will have left are memories; that we are helpless to prevent what always strikes us as a death too soon. It is different than the impending death of a human companion—we can talk to them, and reminisce, and discuss what is happening. But when a dog feels the end approaching, and I am convinced they do, they turn their eyes to us in a different kind of way. We cannot entirely understand what they are asking, but it breaks our hearts anyway.

Recently, I began to reflect about Benjy’s prospective death. Benjy is a thirteen-year-old yellow Labrador. He has lived with me, my wife Leila, and our two boys, Ilan and Manu, for the last eleven years. His life expectancy is between ten and twelve, so the time is coming when he will die. I find that idea unbearable. Suppose things get so bad that I have to call the vet and have him come and give an injection as I hold Benjy in my arms, and I have to watch as the life leaves him? In my mind I see him give me a look of profound incomprehension, and then lick me. Why do I imagine it happening like this? Because I have heard it from so many people—friends, strangers, and readers of my books on the emotional lives of animals. Nothing brings home to us the depth of our relations to cats and dogs, and other animals who share our lives, like their deaths. Their lives are so much shorter than humans’. We know death is coming, and no matter how much we steel ourselves to the inevitable, it comes as a shock. I am trying to understand why this should be. Maybe because these animals look to us for help, and when they are dying, they want us to stop it from happening. And that is just what we want to do but cannot. We feel suddenly helpless, and are confronted with mortality in general, writ large in these animals who have become family, but in some sense even more than family—maybe part of ourselves.

Whenever I mentioned to friends that I was thinking of writing a book on this topic, invariably everyone had a story. Even my optometrist friend in Auckland, Grant Watters, said to me, “I can’t think of anything worse than my dog dying.” As he pointed out, their IQ might not be the highest, but their EQ, their emotional intelligence, is in the stratosphere! I completely agree.

In this book I want to explore these themes, by reflecting about the deaths of companion animals, using as sources the many letters I receive, conversations with friends who have lost their animals, and with veterinarians who have put animals down for their human companions—avoiding the politically loaded term owners. My primary focus will be on dogs and cats, but I will range further and also look at other animals with whom we share our lives. I would suggest there has been a change over the decades: once we were supposed to get over this quickly. Today mourning a lost animal is considered healthy and appropriate. In this book, I will look more closely at the psychology of loss.

It has been argued that dogs and cats do not have a sense of death. I am not sure this is true. Of course one could say it is merely conjecture, but so many of the accounts I have heard and read indicate that the dog or the cat (possibly less than dogs) actually looks to the human in a unique way at the moment of death, as if recognizing that this is the final good-bye and aware of the depth of the occasion. It is not like saying good-bye for the day, and the dog, I believe, realizes this. Death could well be as relevant to them as it is to us. This to me says that our relations with other animals is far deeper than we have usually been willing to recognize. The emotional bond is nothing less than the one between parent and child. We do not expect to lose a child and, when the animal dies, the feeling is similar.

I have been thinking about the subject of this book nearly my entire life, as have many people—and for the same reason. Loss. I had a beloved cocker spaniel for many years when I was very young. When I was ten, we found Taffy dead in our backyard, long before she should have died. My parents told me she had been poisoned by a mean neighbor who did not like hearing our dog bark or watching him race around our yard.

I was beside myself, as I am sure any child is, when their “best friend” suddenly dies. I can still remember the moment I saw Taffy’s dead body, and how perplexed I was and then how I suddenly burst into tears realizing that Taffy would not come back with me that day or any other day. Death may be hard to understand for a child, but I understood perfectly that something had left my life and would not return. I could not be consoled. I just felt heartache and I think it would have been best for someone close to me to simply say they understood. Instead I was told what I knew were lies, namely that Taffy was waiting for me somewhere in the vast beyond and that we would be reunited. Also, that Taffy did not suffer, when I could see her purple tongue protruding from her mouth and to me, it looked like she died in agony, which I am sure is what happens when a dog is poisoned. It took me a long time to get over this first death and even now at seventy-nine years old, I can still remember the feelings I had then and the sense of loss that never entirely left me.

Is the grief we feel when a companion animal dies a popular topic? Indeed it is. Just recently there was a column in The New York Times by the author Jennifer Weiner: “What the President Doesn’t Get About Dogs,” in which she writes about how when her dog Wendell died, “it felt like the world had been knocked off its orbit.” The “us” vs. “them” attitude that we have been accustomed to in terms of our relationship with animals is beginning to lose its hold. We see this even in popular culture, as the film The Shape of Water demonstrates: the river “monster” in the film is capable of far deeper love than the scientist intent on destroying him.

The more we know an animal personally, the more we are likely to accord them emotional and cognitive complexity. Any nonvegetarian (I address this topic more directly in chapter 12) is put immediately outside their comfort zone when looking into the eye of a pig or a cow. It is too much like looking into the eye of your neighbor. To reach this point you don’t need to do a whole lot of research, you just need to look. It may be mysterious, but it’s not a mystery: these living beings are every bit as complex as we are, especially when we enter the realm of feelings.

I remember how outraged people were when General William Westmoreland said in the Oscar-winning 1974 Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” Could he have believed this or was it just convenient? After all, if you are responsible for the death of some three million people, it probably helps your conscience to think they did not mind dying. A lot has changed since the 1970s in our attitude toward both other ethnicities and other animals. The battle for the recognition of dogs and other animals as sentient, and thus fully capable of suffering as much or more than human animals may not have been completely won, but scientists are now far more inclined than they were some years ago to acknowledge sentience in animals we know (but not the ones we do not know!). Moreover, we also recognize that this battle is not entirely unrelated to the one for the recognition of equality among ethnicities. What would ever induce anyone to think that one race or ethnicity is superior to any other?

And so, if we accord these animals dignity in life, we should obviously do the same in death. The death of any animal is an occasion for solemnity. I doubt that any reader has managed to avoid the sorrow that comes when saying good-bye to an animal they loved.

I have many such memories. One in particular has stuck with me. When I was a graduate student in India, many years ago, I had a strange incident with a dog. His mother was killed by a car in front of my house and when I heard the sound of the accident, I rushed out to find the mother dead and a small puppy, just a few weeks old, wailing in despair. I could not say what kind of dog he was—maybe just what Indians call a village dog. He looked like a kind of terrier, very small with white fur and black-tipped ears. I took him into my house, and so began a strange yearlong relationship between me and Puppy, as I called him. As might be expected, I became his mother, in fact his everything, and he would never leave my side.

He was not, however, a healthy dog. I was working on my Ph.D. in Sanskrit and, as the time came closer for me to return to Harvard, I was increasingly worried about what would happen to Puppy. I could not take him back to Cambridge, that was for sure. Finally, I found a family that agreed to take him. They lived in the country, far from the university.

I had the privilege of working with one of India’s greatest traditional scholars, Pandit Srinivasa Shastri. He was a consummate Sanskrit scholar but spoke no English. So he and I communicated in classical Sanskrit, much to the amusement, or sometimes the astonishment, of bystanders. He was very orthodox, and his religion prohibited him from teaching a foreigner the finer points of the sacred language. However, we liked each other enormously, and he agreed to teach me on condition that I come to his office in the university before 6 AM when nobody would see me. Being an early riser, this suited me fine.

But he would not let me bring Puppy, as he shared some of the prejudices that many orthodox Hindus had (or have?) against dogs: they are considered unclean and should never be touched. The day arrived when I had to relinquish Puppy. With great sadness I watched as he was driven away, his eyes fixed on me from the back of the car in disbelief and obvious agony. He had never been separated from me like this before.

The next morning I went to visit my pandit at the assigned time. I was sad and I explained why. He was not terribly sympathetic; I could tell. Kukurrasneha he called it—love for a dog. It was not celebrated in the sacred texts, except, I later learned, in a wonderful story from the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, which I will relate later in the book. After about half an hour we heard a noise at the door. We looked at each other in disbelief. Who could be there at this ungodly hour? And what did they want with us? Had my pandit been caught teaching an illicit student? I opened the door but nobody was there. Instead, in rushed a very excited Puppy! He made it clear that he was overjoyed that he had found me. Srinivasa was not, however. He shrieked and jumped up on the desk so as not to be defiled by the touch of Puppy, who looked determined, in his joy, to lick everything in sight.

But then Srinivasa must have suddenly realized that this small dog had somehow found his way to an empty university just a day after having been taken miles away. We heard later that a small dog had been observed to jump on the bus and gotten off at the university stop. Srinivasa’s attitude changed completely: known for his eloquence and skill at extemporaneous rhyming, he looked compassionately at Puppy and made up a Sanskrit verse to the effect that we had been together in a previous life and karma insisted we stay together in this one.

I was so dumbfounded by the strange encounter that I did not know what to think. I could not even imagine how Puppy had found me. I took him home, with Srinivasa telling me in a most stern manner that I was never under any circumstances to abandon him again, even if it meant living the rest of my (his?) life in India. I was inclined to agree with his admonition. But it was a dilemma.

That evening I was discussing it with my best friend Robert Goldman, also a graduate student in Sanskrit and a dog lover like myself. As we sat there in the quiet dusk of a hot summer night in Poona, Puppy lay on my lap, gazing at me lovingly. He was so obviously relieved to have found me. I can only imagine how he had suffered, perhaps fearing that I had given him away? Suddenly he let out a huge sigh, his whole small body trembling from the effort, and he fixed his gaze on me with love—of that there can be no question. I was deeply moved. Then, his eyes still fixed on me with an odd look, he suddenly lay still. He had died.

It was not my first experience of the death of a beloved dog, but it was the one that got me thinking about the deaths of all animals to whom we become close. I want to understand the grief we feel under these circumstances, and to explore further that mysterious bond we share with the animals who enter our lives and become, without a shadow of a doubt, family.

I am sure all readers, or most of them, will agree with me that dogs are family. And yet, several friends who have lost children and dogs have written to me to express the profound difference. Yes, they acknowledge, losing a beloved dog is a terrible experience, not to be made light of, that can have a serious impact. But, they tell me, it is nothing like losing a child. I cannot dispute this, because I have never lost a child, and I know I would find it hard to even survive if I did. What they tell me feels right, but on the other hand I am not sure why one needs to engage in this comparison of suffering. What is important is to stress, especially for anyone from “outside”—that is to somebody who has lost neither—that it is a completely humbling experience. It can lead to a profound paralysis of the will: how can we simply go on living after something as monumental as this has happened? It is like a tear in the film that envelops us in everyday reality. Suddenly we are faced with the void. I can understand how people go into a deep depression as a result of such a loss.

Yet while everyone understands grief when it comes to human loss, not everyone accords the same significance to the grief that many people feel when their companion animal dies. It can be devastating, and we need to acknowledge that. Surely it is not necessary for me to say that losing a child is one of the most awful things that can happen. But in the case of dogs, and other animals as well, it is not yet self-evident, except to the people directly involved. And even they, some of them tell me, feel somewhat embarrassed at the wild grief that overcomes them when this happens.

Trying to understand the depth of despair that can overcome us leads to a recognition that our bond with animals is not just one of utility or in any way sentimental, but is something completely different that we have been, for centuries, reluctant to acknowledge. Strangely, this reluctance is paralleled by a similar reluctance to acknowledge that animals grieve for one another—and, as I will presently make clear, for us as well. It is true that we know much less about this than about our own grief, but the parallel is clear: just as we grieve for them, so they grieve for us. It is now clear that, apart from humans many other animals grieve as well, some of them almost certainly as intensely as do we (I am thinking of elephants). I am sure there has never been a time in our evolutionary history that we have not grieved for those we loved, and I believe the same is true for many wild animals. Grief is not unknown in nature any more than it is unknown in humans for our entire evolutionary history.


Copyright © 2020 by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson