Pet Loss: Do Pets Grieve When Another Pet Dies?

If you’re reading this while living through it, the short version is reassuring: what your surviving pet is doing is normal, and the steadiness of ordinary routine is the thing that helps most.

Do Pets Grieve When Another Pet Dies?

Pets show grief-like changes after losing a companion in the large majority of cases studied. In a 2022 study published in Scientific Reports, which surveyed 426 owners whose dog had lost a canine housemate, around 86% reported behaviour changes in the surviving dog, and only 13.4% saw none at all [1].

What matters isn’t whether animals experience loss the way we do, which science can’t yet answer. It’s that the surviving animal’s world has genuinely changed: a companion’s scent, routines and social signals have gone, and the household’s own behaviour has shifted around the absence. The same study found the closeness of the relationship between the two dogs predicted the changes better than how long they’d lived together.

Researchers are honest about one wrinkle: an owner’s own grief colours what they notice, and pets read our sadness too. Both things can be true at once. The dog is responding to the loss, and to you.

How Do Dogs Show Grief?

Grieving dogs most often seek more attention and do less of everything else. In the 2022 study, owners reported these changes most frequently [1]:

• Attention seeking increased in 67% of dogs
• Playing declined in 57%
• General activity dropped in 46%
• Sleeping increased in 35%
• Eating decreased in 32%, and 30% vocalised more

Some dogs also wait at doors, check the other dog’s bed, or settle in the spots the missing companion used. None of it means something is wrong with your dog. It means something is missing.

How Do Cats Show Grief?

Cats respond to loss at least as strongly as dogs, just more quietly. An earlier study in the journal Animals, covering 159 dogs and 152 cats in Australia and New Zealand, found 78% of cats changed their affectionate behaviour after losing a companion, with 40% demanding noticeably more attention [2].

Vocalising is the distinctive feline signal: 43% of the cats in that study called out more often after the loss, and around a third called more loudly. Nearly two thirds showed territorial changes, most commonly seeking out the deceased companion’s favourite sleeping spots [2].

A grieving cat may also hide more, eat less, or groom differently, which is easy to miss in an animal that already keeps its own counsel. The shifts show up first as changes in your cat’s usual body language: a lower posture, a stiller tail, less of the everyday chirping conversation.

Grief is the strongest form of a reaction cats show in milder ways all the time; the research on how cats respond when their owners are away finds the same searching, calling and extra contact-seeking on a smaller scale after an ordinary absence.

How Long Does Pet Grief Last?

Most grief-related behaviour changes in pets fade within six months, and many settle far sooner. The Australia and New Zealand study put the median duration under six months [2], while in the Italian study around a third of affected dogs took between two and six months, and a quarter took longer [1].

There’s no correct timetable, for them or for you.

How Can You Help a Grieving Pet?

The most helpful response to a grieving pet is a steady routine with a little extra warmth inside it. Feed at the usual times, walk the usual routes, keep bedtimes where they were. Predictability is the language pets read best, and it says the world is still safe.

Beyond routine, a few things tend to help. Company, offered rather than imposed: sit nearby and let the animal choose the distance. Gentle engagement, like short games, sniffy walks or food puzzles, which give the day some shape back. And patience with clinginess, which is the animal solving the problem the only way it knows.

Two things are worth holding off on. Washing the missing pet’s bedding immediately removes a scent anchor the survivor may still be using, so many behaviourists suggest leaving it a week or two. And a new pet, brought home quickly to fill the gap, asks a grieving animal to negotiate a stranger at its lowest moment. There’s no rush. The right time is when the household, human and animal, has its feet back under it.

Children often watch the surviving pet closely and ask questions on its behalf, which can be their own way into the conversation. There’s separate support on helping children through pet loss, including how to answer the hard questions simply.

Most of the time, patience and routine are the whole answer.

When Is It More Than Grief?

A grieving pet that stops eating altogether needs a vet’s opinion rather than more time. Cats in particular can become unwell quickly when food stops for more than a day or so, and appetite loss in either species can be illness wearing grief’s clothing.

The same applies if low mood deepens rather than lifts over several weeks. A check-up rules out the physical causes, and vets see this pattern often enough that the conversation will be a kind one. Taking the animal in also gives you something practical to do, which helps more than it sounds like it should.

Looking after the humans is part of the same job. Grief in a household lands on everyone at once, and the animal often steadies as you do, which makes your own recovery part of theirs.

Be patient with them, and with yourself. There’s support here on coping with the loss of a pet whenever you want it, and no timetable for needing it. The routine you rebuild for your surviving pet has a way of rebuilding yours too.