FACTORS AFFECTING GRIEF

How you experience mourning and grief depends on many factors. The circumstances surrounding the pet’s death, your age, the role that the pet filled for you and your family all play a significant part. Many people have recently experienced the loss of a close human, and this will have a definite impact on their reaction to the loss of their pet. Some people do not start to properly grieve their lost human until the pet loss grief triggers them.

Children and the elderly deal differently with grief. When a pet disappears, children may be especially fearful of becoming lost or separated from their family.

People have different relationships with their pets. For some their pet is a security blanket, providing companionship, but also protection. This role is often the case in the elderly living alone. Even small dogs make great alarms, and the loss of a large gentle dog can affect the perceived ability of the owner to feel secure in their home at night, or to walk in confidence through the streets. In this case, the grief might parallel that felt by the loss of a guide or assistance dog.


If the pet was a ‘substitute child’, then they have acted as a outlet for nurturing instincts and love. This may apply to singles and couples alike; and can be the case in all age groups; young singles, empty nesters, or those unable to conceive. Some pets represent a link to someone else. This is often the case when someone has lost their partner, whether through death or divorce, or when the pet belonged to a child who has died (many of us will have seen the client who spend a fortune trying to save a budgie that belonged to their deceased child). The pet has become a tangible and physical tie to someone that they can no longer see, touch or talk to. The loss, or threat of loss can become almost too much to bear for such people, both because of the new grief, and because of the intensity it brings to the old grief.

Some owners develop a very strong relationship with their pet because they have no other significant human relationships. While there is nothing wrong with this in theory, when the pet dies it brings an added intensity and level of grief, as the owner now truly believes that they are alone in this world. The loss of their pet may well echo the previous losses that have left them ‘alone’ in the first place.