Animal Grief And Mourning

Animal Grief And Mourning: A growing body of field research, part of a discipline now called comparative thanatology, documents animals responding to death with behavior that looks like grief: lingering by bodies, carrying dead young, touching remains, going quiet or withdrawing. Elephants, great apes, whales, dolphins, corvids and even peccaries show it, raising hard questions about what animals understand about death.

Tahlequah: In 2018 this Pacific Northwest orca, known as J35, carried her dead calf for 17 days across roughly 1,000 miles, balancing it on her head as it kept sinking. The world followed her 'tour of grief,' and she did it again with another lost calf in early 2025.

Flo: The beloved matriarch of Jane Goodall's Gombe chimpanzees died in 1972 and received a real obituary in The Sunday Times, possibly the first ever written for a wild animal.

Flint: After his mother Flo died, the 8 year old chimp stopped eating, withdrew from the group and sat at the spot where she died. He was dead within about a month, and Jane Goodall wrote that grief played a major part.

Barbara J. King: The anthropologist's 2013 book How Animals Grieve set a strict test: grief is when a survivor's normal routine visibly changes after a death, through altered eating, sleeping or social behavior.

Cynthia Moss: Studying the elephants of Kenya's Amboseli since 1972, Moss has watched families stop at the bones of their dead, turning them over with their trunks and feet, sometimes carrying pieces away.

Eleanor: When this matriarch collapsed in Kenya's Samburu reserve in 2003, an elephant from a different family named Grace tried to lift her back to her feet, then stood by her, visibly distressed. Researchers led by Iain Douglas-Hamilton documented elephants from several families visiting her body over the following week.

Karen McComb: Her 2006 experiments in Amboseli showed elephants spend far more time investigating elephant skulls and ivory than the skulls of buffalo or rhino, proof they specifically recognize their own dead.

Elephants' Graveyard: The legend of a secret place where old elephants go to die has no scientific basis. The real behavior is stranger: elephants return again and again to remains scattered where their family members fell.

Pansy: In 2008 the death of this elderly chimp at Scotland's Blair Drummond Safari Park was filmed. Group members checked her body, groomed her, and her daughter Rosie stayed by her all night. Afterward the group avoided the platform where she died for days.

Bossou: After a 2003 respiratory epidemic in this Guinea forest, two chimpanzee mothers carried the bodies of their infants for weeks, one for about 68 days, as the bodies mummified. They groomed them and shooed away flies as if they were still alive.

Gana: In 2008 this gorilla at Germany's Münster Zoo held up the body of her dead three month old son Claudio for days, nudging and inspecting him. Photos of her vigil stunned visitors and made headlines worldwide.

Koko: When her kitten All Ball was hit by a car in 1984, the sign language trained gorilla reportedly signed words like 'cry,' 'sad' and 'frown,' and was heard making sounds her caretakers associated with weeping.

Alecia Carter: Her team's 2021 study analyzed more than 400 cases of primate mothers carrying dead infants across 50 species. Great apes and Old World monkeys did it most, and mothers carried longer when the infant was very young or died of illness rather than trauma.

Giovanni Bearzi: His 2018 review gathered dozens of reports of whales and dolphins attending dead companions across about 20 species, mostly mothers pushing and carrying dead calves, sometimes for days.

Joan Gonzalvo: In Greece's Amvrakikos Gulf, this researcher watched a bottlenose dolphin mother spend two days pushing her decomposing newborn to the surface, barely stopping to feed.

Teresa Iglesias: Her 2012 UC Davis study found western scrub jays that spot a dead jay call loudly and gather around it, then stop feeding for a day or more. The press dubbed them bird funerals.

Kaeli Swift: In her University of Washington experiments, a researcher in a mask held a dead crow and wild crows swarmed, scolding. They avoided the spot and harassed that mask for weeks, suggesting crow 'funerals' are partly about learning danger.

Marc Bekoff: The ethologist described watching magpies in Boulder, Colorado gather around a dead magpie, gently peck it, then lay pieces of grass beside the body before flying off one by one.

Dante de Kort: In 2016 this Arizona student filmed a herd of collared peccaries returning for days to a dead herd member, nuzzling it, sleeping beside it and chasing off coyotes that came to feed.

Zoe Muller: The giraffe researcher recorded giraffe mothers in Kenya staying with their dead calves for hours to days, an unusual amount of time for an animal that otherwise rarely lingers.

Federica Pirrone: Her 2022 study of more than 400 dog owners in Italy found about 86 percent saw negative changes, such as more sleeping, less eating, and more attention seeking, in a dog after another household dog died.

Hachikō: This Akita met his owner, Professor Hidesaburō Ueno, at Tokyo's Shibuya Station every day. After Ueno died in 1925, Hachikō kept showing up for nearly 10 years, and got a bronze statue there while still alive.

Greyfriars Bobby: Edinburgh's famous Skye terrier supposedly guarded his master's grave for 14 years until 1872. Historian Jan Bondeson argues the story was partly a tourism stunt and that the original dog may even have been replaced.

Jane Goodall: Goodall was criticized early in her career for naming chimps and describing their emotions instead of numbering them. Her accounts of Flint and Flo helped force science to take animal grief seriously.