Grieving

I've always been an animal lover.  I grew up with dogs, and have had one or more dogs or cats all of my adult life.  Add to that a near-fanatical passion for birding, and a general fascination with wildlife of all sorts, and it's no wonder I went into biology.

My background in evolutionary genetics has driven home the point that humans aren't as different from the rest of the animal world as a lot of us seem to think.  The false distinction between "human" and "animal" is a pretty hard one to overcome, however, which explains the argument I got into with a professor at the University of Washington over a mouse he'd killed for experimental purposes when I was in an animal physiology class.

Even back then, I understood that non-human animals die for experimental purposes all the time.  Despite my youth, I had thought deeply about the ethical conundrum of sacrificing the lives of our fellow animals for the benefit of science and medicine, and had come to the conclusion (an opinion I still hold) that it is a necessary evil.  But what I could not stomach was the professor's cavalier attitude toward the life he'd just taken -- joking around, acting as if the little warm body he held in his hand had been nothing but a mobile lump of clay, worthy of no respect.

"It's not like animals have feelings," I recall his saying to me, with a faint sneer.  "If you spend your time anthropomorphizing animals, you'll never make it in this profession."

I remembered, while he was lecturing me in a patronizing fashion about my soft-heartedness, pets I had owned, and I had a momentary surge of self-doubt.  Was he right?  I began to question my own sense that my dogs and cats loved me, and were feeling something of the same kind of bond toward me that I felt toward them.  Is my puppy's wagging tail when I talk to him nothing more than what C. S. Lewis called a "cupboard love" -- merely a response that he knows will get him fed and petted and played with, and a warm place to sleep?

But I couldn't bring myself to believe that forty years ago, and I don't believe it now.  I have several times gone through the inevitable tragedy of losing beloved pets, and what has struck me each time is not only how I and my wife have reacted, but how our other animals have.  Most recently, when our sweet, quirky little one-eyed Shiba Inu, Cleo, somehow got out of our fence and was hit and killed by a passing car, our big old pit bull Guinness went into a positive decline.

It was unexpected in a way, because Cleo and Guinness didn't really interact all that much; they kind of didn't speak the same language.  Cleo, typical of her breed, was independent, curious, and eccentric; Guinness is strongly bonded to us (especially my wife, whom he follows around like a shadow), protective, and thinks that chasing a tennis ball is the most fun hobby ever.  But when Cleo died, Guinness went into a prolonged period of grief that nearly matched our own.

Recent experiments have shown that the neurochemical underpinning of emotions in our brain are shared by dogs and cats -- they experience a surge of oxytocin when they see their friends (whether human or not) just like we do.  When I go out to get the mail and come back inside under a minute later, and my puppy Jethro greets me as if he thought I'd abandoned him forever and ever and OMIGOD I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE BACK, he really is experiencing something like the rush we feel when seeing someone we dearly love.

Of course, he does like belly rubs, too.

If you needed one more piece of evidence of the falsehood of my long-ago professor's contention that non-human animals don't experience emotion, it came out this week in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.  A study of pet cats -- an animal widely considered to be independent and self-sufficient -- experience genuine grief when a family member dies, even if that family member is another pet...

... and even when it's a dog.

The study analyzed the behavior of 450 cats that had gone through loss, and the results were widely consistent -- grieving cats slept and ate less, vocalized more, hid more, refused to play but became clingy, and appeared to look for their lost friend.  "Unlike dogs, we tend to think that cats are aloof and not social," said Jennifer Vonk, a comparative/cognitive psychologist at Oakland University and a co-author of the work.  "They may not form packs like wild dogs, but in the wild, cats still tend to band together and form hierarchies...  I think we’ve been mischaracterizing them."

The divide between ourselves and our pets -- and by extension, between us and the rest of the natural world -- is far narrower than many of us think.  A lot of pet owners say "he understands every word I say" (I've been guilty of that myself), which is certainly untrue, but the emotional resonance between pets and the rest of the members of their household is undeniable.  And grief is experienced deeply by a great many more species than ourselves.

But y'all'll have to excuse me.  Jethro is looking at me with his big, soulful brown eyes.  He hasn't lost a friend or anything, but probably would like a belly rub.

Gotta keep my priorities straight.

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Since this post is pet-related, I thought it was a good opportunity to put in a plug for our Third Annual Pandemic Pottery Sale.  My wife and I are both amateur potters, so we tend to get overrun with pottery we don't have space for.  Two years ago, we came up with the idea of selling a bunch of it and donating the proceeds to charity.  This year the recipient we chose is the fabulous Stay Wild Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (where we got our two wonderful rescue dogs Jethro and Rosie).  They do fantastic work and are constantly dealing with costly animal care and bringing dogs and cats from states with kill shelters (Jethro came from Georgia, Rosie from Texas), which is crazy expensive.

The way it works is if you see a piece you like, you make a bid on it.  If no one else bids, it's yours.  If there are competing bids, the high one gets the piece.  A few provisos: first, the shipping costs outside of the United States are prohibitively expensive -- so unfortunately, this event is limited to our American friends.  Second, all of the pieces EXCEPT AS MARKED are food safe, microwave safe, and dishwasher safe.  However: we work with stoneware clay, which is not completely vitrified even when glazed and fired properly, so if you're using a piece to hold water long-term (mostly this caution is for vases) make sure to put something underneath it so you don't ruin nice furniture.  (Many of them won't leak, but don't take the chance.)

Once most of the pieces are claimed, we'll present Jane George, who runs Stay Wild, with what will hopefully be a big check!

So check out the website, take a look at the gallery, and bid on what takes your fancy!  Feel free to pass the link along to interested friends.  Enjoy!

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