THURSDAY, Feb. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Anyone who has more than one dog might have seen it unfold: A beloved pet dies, and the remaining dog seems to suffer as deeply as the rest of the family.
Now, new Italian research adds to evidence that man's best friend does indeed mourn such a loss.
Eighty-six percent of 426 dog owners who had lost one of their animals said their surviving dog went on to display negative behavioral changes for months. Those changes included playing and eating less, sleeping more, becoming more fearful, and tending to whine and bark more often.
But does this all add up to canine grief?
"Overall, demonstration of grief in non-human animals is one of the biggest challenges facing science," acknowledged study author Dr. Federica Pirrone. She's a lecturer of veterinary ethology and animal welfare in the department of veterinary medicine and animal science at the University of Milan.
Pirrone noted that "other social species -- such as great apes, whales, dolphins, elephants and birds -- have been described to engage in death rituals in which one could see the expression of grief."
But "emotions, particularly complex emotions like grief, are still a shady, and thus intriguing, side of the lives of domestic dogs," she said. "At least for us humans."
To gain better insight into canine grief, the study team administered a questionnaire to 384 women and 42 men who had lost a dog relatively recently.
On average, the dogs who died had been in the owner's household for nearly 10 years, and in just over half the cases their death happened unexpectedly.
More than 9 in 10 said their surviving dog had lived with the dog who had died for at least a year, and many said that activity sharing was common: two-thirds of the dogs had slept together; more than a quarter had groomed each other; half had played with each other; and more than half (54%) had never fought. Just over a third also shared their food, nearly 60% shared their toys, and 86% shared resting areas.
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