Is Grief and Mourning for a Pet and a Family Member the Same? A Narrative Review
Authors: Mariano Stefano 
Published: September 2024

Many people live with pets and most of them are considered as family members. So, when a pet dies, people experience grief and mourning. Despite the recent increase in research interest in human-pet relationships, as far as I know there is no review that answers this question: are grief and mourning for a pet and for a family member the same thing? The present narrative review can be a first step in answering this question.

METHODS: This review was conducted according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) statement in the PubMed database. After removal of duplicates and examination of titles and abstracts, 50 papers were included in the review. The retrieved articles were selected and evaluated by reading each of them in full text. The author of this study is one, therefore, to reduce the probability of bias in the selection process, this selection was repeated after three months.

DISCUSSION: Only one study among those examined directly compared the severity of grief over human death and the death of a pet. In this study, no significant differences were found between pain severity levels. However, since grief is a subjective experience, this work has the limitation that the same person did not experience the loss of a family member and a pet. It also presents other critical issues since it does not examine the factors that can influence the response to the loss.

Furthermore, three other research articles dealt in depth with the topic of mourning following the loss of a pet, although their main objective was not the analysis of the comparison between the pain of losing a pet and that of a human family member. Cervantes (2023) developed a systematic review whose objectives were: to better understand the grieving process and experience in humans after the loss of a pet to promote mental health well-being in the workplace. The second research identified is that of Testoni et al. (2023) whose objective was to validate the HHHHMM quality of life scale in the Italian context (Villalobos, 2011). The third paper, (Uccheddu et al. 2019) has the aim objective to validate a new tool, the Mourning Dog Questionnaire, but is limited to the pain and mourning resulting from the loss of a dog.

CONCLUSIONS: Research indicates that pet owners experience a spectrum of pain and pain intensity when their pet dies, ranging from moderate to excruciating.

This grief is often compared to that felt over the loss of a close family member. However, many variables influence the intensity of mourning: age, social condition (living alone or in a family context) of the caregiver/pet owner, age of the dead animal, etc. Therefore, further research is needed.

Furthermore, this review reveals widespread underestimation of the grief associated with the loss of a pet, both by society at large and by individuals who do not own a pet.

This disenfranchised grief can have a profound emotional impact on those who experience the loss of a pet.

It is also clear that veterinarians can play a role in helping pet owners grieve and in improving the well-being, resilience, and quality of life of people experiencing pet loss. Additionally, further research is needed to develop a measure of grief disavowal specific to pet loss.