How to make someone feel better after losing a pet: Using what we know about death to bring comfort to the grieving

Getting past the grief of losing a beloved pet can be very hard, especially if the pet’s death was difficult. When our darling animals die due to injury or illness it is almost impossible to shift our thoughts away from their suffering: we love them, therefore we empathise with them. And, very, very often, we feel tremendous guilt for their death and suffering. But new insights into death, or rather into near-death, might be able to offer us some consolation. Perhaps what your pet experienced while dying was gentle, and sweet, and what they lived, in that moment, was filled with compassion?

The new insights into dying, or near-death, of which I speak come from science. Specifically, they come from studies into the experience of dying as this has been reported on by people who have been brought back from clinical death after traumatic injury, or after such health events as heart-attacks. Dying, according to the vast majority of these people, is blissful. From the many studies that have been done on these happy survivors of clinical death, we gather that broadly speaking, death happens in stages: first darkness and the cessation of pain, and hen the sense of emerging into (the) light and a feeling of peacefulness. Dying, it would seem from the people whose experience these studies report on, is mystical, beautiful, serene. Importantly, it did not matter what religion they belonged to, the people in the studies surveyed, even if that was none at all, their experiences were all very similar.

Do we have any reason to believe that our beloved animals might enjoy similar experiences when themselves approaching death?  The sense of darkness and the cessation of pain, and the sense of emerging into (the) light followed by feelings of peacefulness, all have physiological causes. There are things going on in the human brain that are causing those sensations in our near-death study subjects. Mammal brains are all very similar, differing in size and of course in detail, but alike nonetheless, and bird brains and reptile brains are not wildly different from mammal brains. So, physiologically at least, there is no good reason to think that pet’s experience of dying is all that different from human dying.

Here we have a quote from a woman reporting on her own experience of dying. Tell me, is there anything that is expressed in it that seems to go too far beyond the realm of possible experience for your cat, your dog, your horse, your parrot, your iguana?

“I was lying above my own body, totally free of pain, and looking down at my own self with compassion for the agony I could see on the face; I was floating peacefully. Then ... I was going elsewhere, floating towards a dark, but not frightening, curtain-like area ... Then I felt total peace.”

Maybe the out of body experience she reports is too much for you to allow for your pet, but surely you can allow them the absence of pain, the sense of floating peacefully, the sense of heading somewhere dark, and the sensation of total peace?

There will be some especially sceptical of my suggestion, as for a long time now, the scientific and philisophic mood has been to deny non-human animals the sorts of experience that we humans experience.  But lots of science has been done over the last few decades that brings we and other animals far closer in terms of cognition (capacity to know) and emotion than those with the more antiquated outlook would allow.  I’m sure you’ve already heard that pigs can play videogames, and that crows, cockatoos, and a great number of primates, all use tools? Had you heard that dolphins have names for each other and that cats are better are at associating words with objects than human babies are? Surely, you’ve heard that gorillas, chimps, and dogs have vocabulary skills? Octopuses, meanwhile, make friends with humans, and are incredible escape artists, just like cats. And that loving look in your beloved pet’s eye? Animals share with us oxytocin, the love hormone.

All up then, the possibility that the dying of our darling pets is something much like our dying is very high: There are more similarities between the species than there are differences, as far as basic cognition and emotion go. Perhaps one day, science will be able to report on what non-human animals experience when they go through death, and my suggestion will be shown to be wrong. But I very much doubt that day will come, and so should you: the science is on our side. Allow yourself to believe that what your beloved little darling went through was, in its final moments, a painless, peaceful, compassionate process, rather than a harsh and cruel one, and take comfort in, and have faith in, that belief. Tell that too, to any friend you might have, who is grieving the loss of their pet, and let the kind and sweet thought spread, to offer consolation to anyone else who might need to hear it.