Unexplainable - Is animal grief real?

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

A dog on its owner’s grave. A killer whale carrying around its dead calf. A goose that isolates when its mate dies. These behaviors in animals may look like human mourning, but should scientists call them "grief"? (First published in 2023) Guests: Jennifer Vonk, comparative/cognitive psychologist at Oakland University; Jessica Pierce, bioethicist and author of several books about animals; Susana Monsó, animal ethicist and a philosopher and author of Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. In 2018, media outlets started to be a lot of time. covering the story of a killer whale. This week, there's been a lot of whale news. This killer whale had had a baby, a calf. Then, soon after the birth, that calf died. And the killer whale started to do something unusual. For 17 days, she's been carrying her dead calf on her back.

For hundreds of kilometers. A thousand miles. They say the orca is laboring through the water as she carries the calf either by one fin or pushing it through the water on her head. News anchors, politicians, lots of people commented on this situation. And many of them had a specific word for the behavior of this whale. They called it grief.

We saw a mother's grief. The grieving mom just couldn't let her go. They have grief. They feel grief. These mothers just like humans do. They're huge mammals. But do killer whales feel grief? Just like humans do?

Does any non-human animal? On the one hand, there are lots of compelling examples that suggest that the answer could be yes. Examples of animal species doing grief-like things. The man died earlier this month in a small village. His dog was later found right here at his gravesite, refusing to leave even seven days without food. If you go on YouTube, Facebook,

various news outlets, you can find videos like this. Local villagers now plan on building a kennel for the dog next to its master's grave. Videos of dogs, but also videos of elephants, visiting a corpse. And so you can see that these elephants are kind of holding their trunks out and smelling the body. Donkeys gathering around a dead herd member and making lots of noise. It's not just mammals, it's also birds. Such as the case of Blossom the goose. Sometimes when geese lose a mate, they lose weight, they isolate themselves.

After Bud died, Blossom's grief was as evident as any humans. And when I watch some of these videos, like, I get it. I get why it seems like animals grieve. But for a lot of researchers, seems like is not really good enough. This is unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton. And today on the show, researchers give me the case for and again, saying that some animals experience grief. It's a weirdly trickier problem than you might imagine,

and their answers help us understand what it takes to really get inside another creature's head. To start, if it looks like a grief and it quacks like a grief, why not call it a grief, right? Like, what is the problem here? I reached out to a researcher named Jennifer Vonk, who studies how animals think, including how they think about death.

And she says that the first issue here is that grief itself is not super well defined. I mean, sometimes we try to study something in non-humans and realize that we don't even have a good handle on it in humans. And I think it's like asking, do people fall in love? You know, different people might define that very differently. There are definitions out there, like the American Psychological Association defines grief as the anguish experienced after significant loss. usually the death of a beloved person. But with that word person, like, that definition kind of assumes that you're dealing not just with a human, but with a human understanding of death. I think that grief, and this is just my definition, I guess, it would entail an

understanding of the finality of that loss. Like, the person is gone. It's not fixable. They're never coming back. It's permanent. And, like, understand. death in that kind of abstract way, we don't have evidence that animals have those kind of concepts. It's not that she's some kind of like cold-hearted monster who thinks that animals are emotionless machines, right? Like she very much gets the impulse to sort of attribute emotions to animals. And at home, with her pet cats, she's doing it all the time. My husband and I are always talking about like, oh, so-and-so's jealous, like, look how jealous he is because I'm sitting with the other cat. I mean, their little expressions look like they're angry or sulking or jealous or like we interpret in that way for sure.

But Jennifer says that when it comes to writing down, like, this animal is experiencing jealousy or anger or grief in a scientific context. She's a lot more cautious and she needs a lot more evidence. I think it's a very difficult question to answer because it requires having this sort of access. to their subjective experience, which I, you know, as scientists as much as we would like to have that, everything is kind of an inference based on their external behavior. So, I mean, I think we do, sorry, my eyes are running from allergies. In this moment, Jennifer dabbed at her eyes and nose with a tissue. And if she hadn't been laughing and cracking jokes, like, I might have thought she was pretty upset.

And as she pointed out, like, this is kind of the problem here. See, if you were looking at me, you might think I was experiencing grief when really is just an allergic reaction, but on the outside, it looks exactly the same. Now, if I'm at a human funeral for someone's relative, say, and they are crying into a handkerchief, it's not a huge leap for me to assume, like, that person is probably grieving, right? They're probably not just experiencing allergies. That's because I'm fairly fluent in the language of human emotional reactions and can be pretty confident in what they really mean. But Jennifer says that animals could have an entire emotional language that means something really different from our own. We don't know what it's like to conceive of the world as a killer whale or as a cat or a non-human primate or any individual that doesn't have language, really. So in order for us to understand it, we look for similarities.

But I think what we miss out on are the differences and the fact that they may have a concept that's so totally different from ours that we're not able to recognize what it is that they're processing or how they're representing things. Jennifer says this isn't just sort of theoretical, right? There are real examples of how relying on similarities can be deceiving when you're studying animals. So to take a quick step away from grief, she told me about some studies that were done on chimpanzees. And these studies were trying to figure out if chimps understand when they're being looked at, like that someone else can see them. So in these studies, they sort of had chimps interact with researchers. And specifically to sort of get a treat from the researchers,

the chimps had to hold their hands in a cup position to kind of beg. So it only makes sense to do that if someone, somebody's looking at you and they can see you. Because they have to see you to know to give you a treat. And so the researchers ran these tests. And at first, the chimps reacted in a pretty human-like way. Like, if the researchers were facing the chimps, they did beg. And if a researcher's back was turned, the chimps did not beg.

They were doing what they should be doing if they understood that another person could see them. And the researchers could have just left it there. Like, they could have said, all right, this behavior looks kind of like human behavior. We can just assume it's the same and move on. Instead, they did further tests. Like, for example, the researchers would face the chimp with a blindfold over their eyes. And in that situation, they found that even when someone had a blindfold over their eyes

and clearly could not see, the chimps would still beg. And then you could really see that the chimps weren't really following the cues that we would if you know that someone can only see you by having their eyes focused on you. Because if most humans saw a person with a blindfold over their eyes, like we would think, oh, they can't see me begging or not begging. I don't need to beg. And the chimps didn't sort of immediately make that leap. So yes, like chimps might seem to interact with the world in really similar ways to humans sometimes. But Jennifer says that if you poke around and sort of run careful studies like this, you might find something slightly different is going on in their brains. So they're processing the world in a slightly different way.

I think it is important to be open to the fact that even very different behaviors could mean the same underlying feeling, but also very similar-looking behaviors could arise because of a very different underlying process. Basically, you have to test and sort of probe for differences that reveal things about different species' unique approaches to the world. Which is why, coming back to animals and death, when Jennifer is confronted with something like this story of a killer whale carrying a calf, she's skeptical about calling it grief. Her argument is essentially that if we just sort of layer human interpretations onto animals, if we anthropomorphize them, we risk assuming that we already understand what's going on. And if we do that, we could actually miss something fundamental about how animals think on their own terms or miss the emotional equivalent of kind of a chimp actually having a very different way of thinking about eyes. There are a lot of researchers out there who agree that applying the term grief to non-human animals could lead us astray.

But there are also researchers who do not. So after the break, the case for saying that animals do grieve and the case for asking an entirely different question. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less.

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With its 626 horsepower twin turbo V8 engine, The defender, Octa, is taking on the Dakar rally. The ultimate off-road challenge. Learn more at landrover.ca. Do animals grieve? Before the break, we heard Jennifer Vank make the case that we just don't know enough yet to make a determination here. But Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist who's written several books on animals and death, disagrees with Jennifer Vank's views somewhat. But she thinks that we can say that some non-human animals grieve and even that we should say that.

I think one thing about using the language of grieving and mourning that is valuable is that it allows us to experience empathy for other animals. Jessica laid out a scenario for me. Basically, she said, imagine a dog on a table being given electric shocks. A researcher might be taking measurements and make notes about this dog like... The dog's body seized and the muscles contracted and levels of the hormone cortisol spiked. These are all super clinical observations. They're very safe. They're objective. But they miss the most important thing here.

The fact is you hurt the animal. The animal experienced pain, fear, suffering. And Jessica argues that emotional pain is kind of the same thing. Like if we see an animal expressing emotional pain, we should call it like we see it. Like if a dog seems to be grieving its owner's passing, spending time on his grave, let's not beat around some objective bush. Let's just call that grief. I actually took this back to Jennifer Vank, who said that sort of physical pain is a little bit easier to diagnose and read than something is complex. as emotional pain and especially grief.

But our bioethicist, Jessica, she has a larger point to make here. If you're a skeptic, you're going to say, well, we don't have any scientific proof that animals grieve. Therefore, we can't talk about it. And that, to me, that's really limiting and uninteresting because then you can't even have a conversation

and be curious. Basically, she says that if we are so, super-duper cautious about anthropomorphizing animals and sort of avoiding using words like grief, we end up slamming shut a bunch of doors to further research. We limit what we can potentially learn about animal grief and what we can learn from animals about our own grief. There's a principle in science of parsimony. If something evolved in one species, it's very unlikely. that, you know, it didn't also evolve in other species. And I think to say animals don't grieve,

like, how could it be that those capacities evolved only one time in only one species? If we allow ourselves to assume that things that look like grief and other animals are grief, Jessica says that that lets us ask questions, like, what does grief look like in different animals? are social animals, animals that live in groups, are they more prone to grief than non-social animals? I don't think we have enough evidence yet to say one way or the other, but I think that's a really interesting question.

We could even ask, what is the point of grief? Is it adaptive? Because animals are, in a sense, they're wasting time when they're grieving. When humans grieve, we sometimes don't eat, we sometimes isolate or lie around. And in some ways, these are not particularly useful things to do. You're spending time not mating, not foraging, not protecting territory, not doing the things that you need to do for survival.

So similarly, like when a goose isolates and doesn't pick a new mate or when a killer whale carries around a decomposing calf body, potentially exposing herself to pathogens. What is the adaptive value of? that death-related behavior? What's the adaptive value of magpies covering a dead body in grass? Is there something community-building about grief? Is it necessary if you want to be a social animal?

Could we study different versions of animal grief and find similarities or differences that could teach us about ourselves? Jessica says that if we assume animals are grieving, it opens up these questions to us. These are, I think, fascinating. questions that we can't answer yet. And I mean, I think they tell us a lot about who animals are and how animals think and what animals feel, all of which have ethical relevance and can tell us about ourselves, too.

These are two potential ways to think about the stories of animals that seem to grieve, right? Like, we could say we don't know enough to say that these animals are grieving, or we could say we should assume these animals are grieving and then explore further questions about that grief. But what if we're actually just way too fixated on this whole grief question in the first place? If we're interested in the broader question of how do animals relate to death

and how do animals understand death, how do animals experience death, then we need to look past grief. Grief is only going to be one specific manifestation of animals' relationship with death. Susanna Monsou is an animal ethicist and a philosopher who has written about animal reactions to death. And while she does think that it's possible that perhaps some animals do grieve... It's the other weirder stuff that we can't easily fit into these narratives that I find much more fascinating. Susanna wants researchers to be a little less focus on stories.

of animal death that look familiar, stories about killer whales and their calves or dogs on their master's grave. And instead, she wants a little more focus on the ways that animals react to death that are wildly different from humans. So take storks, for example. There's this video of a stork on YouTube

where you see the stork with several stork babies in a big flat nest. And the stork parent kind of pokes at its chick with a long orange beak, and then grabs one by the neck, the baby kind of wriggles in protest, and the parent drags the baby away from its siblings, pulls it over to the side of the nest,

and drops it onto the roof below. It's a behavior that happens when somehow the mother thinks that there's not enough resources to take care of all her offspring. She will get rid of one. of them. This is, hopefully, not the kind of thing that we see humans doing. In examples like this, and there are a lot of them, the animals are approaching loss and death differently. We just don't really know what to do with it. Like, it's just very confusing. It's very

disturbing to think of a mother who just doesn't care about her infant's dying or her baby's dying. But I think it's also interesting to try to find out what's going on there. Susanna wants researchers to study these things because they're so odd and unfamiliar. And she says that actually if we studied these kinds of very weird, very unhuman reactions to death and loss more closely, we might even circle back into conversations about grief again, just in a really different way. Like, she told me about this famous case from Germany, where a man died, his neighbors found him less than an hour later. And in the meantime, his dog ate him, or ate his face rather. This is actually a weirdly common phenomenon.

And Susanna says you could potentially make a case that this behavior from dogs does demonstrate something like grief, or at least an expression of the loss of an important companion. Because if you look at what specifically a lot of these dogs are eating, What they eat is the face. And I think this is telling because the face is the emotional center of humans. And it's what we know dogs pay the most attention to. She says that wild undomesticated dogs, they will go for a corpse's torso. Because that's where you have all the organs that are nutrient rich.

So when a pet dog goes for the face, Susanna speculates that maybe, who knows, this is actually the dog's way of emotionally, like, working through losing a caretaker. Like, maybe this behavior is grief or grief adjacent, even though it might not look like a common human way to express grief. Or maybe it's not. But it's examples like this that make Susanna want to push researchers away from sort of hyper-focusing on the actions that look familiar to us. I am interested in what is unknown, right? Like those behaviors that are easily explainable are just less interesting because it's like it's easier to see what's happening.

And the ones that are super puzzling, like, why is this dog eating his owner's face if in theory he loves him, you know? That's like the one that can read, it's just something we don't know. I actually find all three of these researchers' cases pretty compelling. In some ways, they're really all just talking about how sort of asking or framing a question limits the answers you can get. Right? Like in Jennifer Vonk's more skeptical argument, she says, if you assume animals are like humans, you miss the ways that they're not like humans potentially. You limit what you learn about them.

But in Jessica Pierce's pushback, she's saying that if you're too cautious about kind of drawing connections between animals and humans, You limit the questions you can ask about animal human relationships. And then for Susanna Manzo, if you're only looking for a very human-like version of grief, you're missing out on a whole bunch of animal weirdness when it comes to death. And ultimately, you know, these three thinkers actually have a fair amount of overlap and even overlapping research interests. But I think it's maybe useful for all three of. of them to disagree a little here or to have different approaches to animals.

Because maybe the only way to get at some kind of an answer to the question of what is happening inside animal heads is to have lots of researchers setting different limits for themselves and asking very different kinds of questions. Thanks so much to all three researchers for their time. Jessica Pierce has a number of books on animals and ethics out, including one called Who's a Good Dog? And Susanna Monso has a book on how animals understand death called Playing Possum. This episode was produced and reported by me, Bird Pinkerton.

It was edited by Brian Resnick and Meredith Hodnott, who also manages our team. We had sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassamfeld. Tian Nguyen checked our facts, and Manning Nguyen is a great person to go to New Jersey with. If you enjoyed the show, I'd really, really love it if you could leave us a review. I'd also love to hear your thoughts directly. You can email us at Unexplanable at Vox.com, and I read every email. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back on Wednesday.