Dogs experience a form of mourning when another dog in the household dies

The loss of a loved one can have a profound impact on humans, affecting everything from sleep patterns to appetite. Researchers say they have found similar changes in dogs who have lost a dog.

The team doesn't know if the findings can be described as grief, but they say the work could indicate an overlooked welfare issue.

Dogs are highly emotional animals who develop very close bonds with the members of the familiar group, according to Dr Federica Pirrone, one of the study's authors. Efforts should be made to help them cope with the distress if one of them dies.

Great apes, dolphins, elephants and birds are some of the species that have been observed to mourn around death.

In the journal Scientific Reports, Pirrone and colleagues describe how they analysed the responses of

All of the participants had experienced the loss of one of their dogs while at least one other dog was still alive, and the questionnaire looked at the behavior and emotions of the owner and their surviving dogs after the death.

The results show that most of the owners said their dogs had changed after the death of another dog.

She said the results did not appear to be affected by the level of attachment between the owner and their dog.

The team said the changes were not related to how long the dogs had lived together or whether the surviving dogs had seen the corpse.

The death may have disrupted shared behaviors for the surviving dogs, according to the researchers.

In support of this hypothesis, we found that if dogs shared food, the surviving dog was more likely to reduce her/his level of activities and sleep more after the loss.

Dogs that were reported to have had a friendly relationship with an animal that had died, or who had been their parent or offspring, were more likely to have changed their behavior.

It is most likely that the surviving dog has lost an attachment figure, who provided safety and security.

Increased levels of fear and a reduction in food consumption were associated with greater suffering, anger and psychological trauma in the owners of the dogs who died.

It means that there might have been some form of social transmission of fear that is common in social species as part of an adaptive strategy with potentially dangerous circumstances. The team said that the finding could be linked to owners' perception of the surviving dogs.

The definition of grief in dogs and young children was not easy to understand.

Dogs do form emotional bonds and hence the loss of a companion animal in their household can be expected to cause behavioural changes, like those we recorded in our study, which overlap what we normally interpret as being grief and mourning.

Prof Hurn said that it was important to understand what a dog may experience upon the death of a canine companion, but that the study had limitations, including that owners were not always good at reading dog behavior.

In the course of my own research, I have seen many dogs and other animals behave in different ways, but ways which suggested to me that they were emotionally impacted by the death of a close companion.