The surprising shame of pet loss: ‘You are supposed to think humans are more important than animals’

Luís Costa published his first volume of poetry, Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat, in November. “It is not about cats,” he said. “It’s about two lovers who cease to be lovers. There’s just a lot of symbolism about cats.” The next month, his cat, Pierogi (“dumpling” in Polish), fell ill. “He had his own Advent calendar. That’s when I noticed he’d lost his appetite,” says Costa. Pierogi had cancer, which had spread to his bowels and his liver. He died just before Christmas. “A couple of weeks ago, while I was hoovering the house, I pushed the table aside and there was a whisker. He was a tuxedo cat, so he had white whiskers. The contrast with the floor was quite striking. That was very hard.”

Everyone who has lost a pet will have a friend or acquaintance who said the wrong thing. When my puppy died of canine parvovirus, my friend kept referring to her as “it”. I’m not saying I have never forgiven her, but that was in 2003 and I don’t seem to have forgotten it. Other greatest hits include: “You still on about that?” and: “When are you getting another one?”

“As if you’re just replacing one furry body with another,” says Susan, who volunteers for Paws to Listen, the grief support service of the charity Cats Protection. She lost Tabitha recently. “A very judgmental cat, certainly, but she was our difficult little madam,” she says. “And now she’s gone and it’s horrible. Her presence filled the house, so when she died … well, it’s just a house now. It isn’t a home.”

Hearing such recollections, and recalling my own loss, it’s clear that pet grief is objectively, indisputably real. Many of us don’t need to be told what it feels like, but wonder why this great open secret – that losing an animal is enormously hard – is so often minimised.

Diane James is the head of pet loss support at the charity Blue Cross. Its bereavement service, for all animals, has been running for 30 years. It takes 20,000 calls a year and advises similar organisations in the US and Canada. “Some people are aghast to hear that it might be harder for someone to lose an animal than a person,” James says. But it depends on the person or the pet.

“When we compared it with the human grief cycle, we noticed some differences,” says James. “We talk about responsibility grief.” The custodian relationship has a particular anguish. Catherine Joyce, a team leader at Paws to Listen, says the bulk of calls are from people who have had to get their cats euthanised: “It’s an incredible burden.” The academic and writer Finn Mackay, who lost their soulmate, a cat called Solomon, just before Christmas, remembers when the vet said: “‘There’s nothing you can do; he’s dying.’ I signed this form and within five minutes they gave him a lethal injection through his paw. For a minute, I thought: this is really stark, this is alpha and omega, I shouldn’t have this power. It was awful.”

There can be an anticipatory grief, too, which seems to be worse with animals than humans. Your power to euthanise freights every moment with the painful question: are you prolonging their suffering for selfish reasons? But after making the painful decision to end their misery, says James, “people say they feel as if they’ve signed a death warrant or they’ve murdered their pet”.

For some, the guilt will be so unbearable that the vet ends up on the receiving end. Lola, 52, lost her eight-year-old rescue staffie cross when she thought she was going in for a routine operation. “It didn’t seem mega-serious until we got a phone call saying: ‘We need your permission not to resuscitate her,’” she says. “I remember it so clearly, being in the kitchen, me pleading with the vet, trying to get him on side, while my husband went mad, shouting at him: ‘You wanker, you’ve killed my dog.’”

It’s common for couples to have very different but equally intense grief responses. My sister and brother-in-law, who have two cats, were caring for a small stray, Slow Cat, who wasn’t allowed in the house. When he took ill suddenly and had to be put down, the vet gave them a moment to say goodbye. My brother-in-law said: “I love you, Slow Cat,” and my sister started laughing, even though she also loved Slow Cat. Sometimes, when you are mourning, the last thing you want to be is married.

When a pet dies shortly after a person, or even a long time after a spouse or parent, it can be especially hard. This may be echo grief, the fresh loss bouncing off the original loss, the feelings similar in a way that may feel shameful, because you are supposed to think humans are more important than animals. So then you have shame on top of sorrow and no certainty over when, if ever, it will end.

Maybe you really are grieving harder for your pet. That is fine, too. Mackay lost another cat, Pixie, before Solomon. “My father had died not long before,” they say. “As bizarre and hard to process as that was, I didn’t use to speak to my dad that often. I was close to him and I loved him very much, but we only spoke every so often on the phone. Pixie was always there.”

Anyway, not all familial relationships are perfect. Costa, who is queer, says: “When I came out, I had a really terrible experience with it. The notion of unconditional love vanished for me at the age of 19. With this cat, I thought: hang on a second, it is possible. It was the first time I’d experienced that.”

Pet mourners can also feel compound grief, when the pet was the mascot of a relationship or a time that has been lost. “People feel like all the memories have died,” says James. If you are talking about an animal with a long lifespan, such as a tortoise, that will bring up memories and losses all the way back to childhood. It can read to the outside world as if you cared more about your dog, say, than your dad, but it may be that you are mourning for both.

Animals often provide solace for their humans through all kinds of difficultly. People struggled with losing pets after Covid, Susan says, “if they were on their own during lockdown with the cat and their relationship became closer by default. People will say: ‘This little cat saw me through my divorce, or my redundancy.’ The cat, knowingly or not, was supporting them.”

The reason people take it hard, when someone asks them if they will replace a pet they are grieving, is the implication that the animal wasn’t unique. So, try not to say that. But James adds the caveat that she doesn’t like rules: “Sometimes, people find talking about loss difficult. We’d rather they say whatever they can, as compassionately as they can, than worry about making a mistake.”

The decision to get a new pet will be personal. “Some people need to do it really quickly,” Susan says. “Some people will never get another cat. Some people need a cat in their lives, but they need time to grieve the cat they’ve lost. It’s hard to form a bond if you take in a new cat too soon.”

Related: The pet I’ll never forget: Bernie ruled our street with an iron paw – and became a local hero

When it comes to disaster stories of grieving pet owners getting new animals, dogs come into their own, being capable of wreaking so much more havoc than cats. The next dog Lola chose was a maniac, as is mine. I got a dog, Romeo, 11 months after the death of Spot, a prince. Romeo is the same breed, but he is not the same. I wouldn’t say we haven’t bonded, but a typical conversation with Romeo will go: “Come sit by me, you little tosser,” and he’ll bowl over, head-butt me in the face, eat my jaffa cake, then sit by me, like a tosser. A typical conversation with Spot would go: “You are a prince,” and he wouldn’t need to do anything, because he would already be sitting by me, like a prince.

Mackay brings up the notion of the “grievability” of things, a subject the philosopher and gender-studies academic Judith Butler has written about. “Any living thing that is not replaceable is grievable,” says Mackay. “I lecture on that with my students; we do the sociology of pets. And they’re rolling their eyes, but as soon as we start to talk about animals they’ve known, they come out with all these unique traits. This dog doesn’t like walking in this weather. This dog growls at postboxes.”

It’s interesting, because Butler was talking about war when she was developing the concept of how we divide lives into grievable and ungrievable by exactly that mechanism: amplifying the uniqueness of some, shading out the uniqueness of others. If you accept that every animal is unique, you accept that, some day, someone is going to be grieving them, hard.

“Dogs don’t live long enough, in my opinion,” says James.