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Playing Less, Eating Less: In dogs, this behavior can indicate something resembling sadness.
Photo: Maryna Terletska/Getty Images
When a dog loses a dog friend from its environment, its behavior often changes: it eats less and sleeps more, it plays less and barks more, it is less active but more anxious - you could also say: the dog mourns.
This is the result of a study published in the magazine »Nature«.
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The study was conducted using an online questionnaire on mourning dogs.
This sheet was filled out by 426 Italian dog owners who owned at least two dogs, one of whom died.
The aim was to find out how the loss of a companion dog affects the behavior of an animal.
87 percent of the dogs were affected
The information provided by the dog owners indicated that a dog can often show grief-related behavior and emotional patterns when a close conspecific dies.
Specifically, two thirds of the owners reported that the dogs left behind were more in need of attention, more than half stated that the dogs were less active.
About a third of the dogs would sleep more, make vocalizations such as barking, growling or whimpering more often, eat less and about a third would also be more anxious than before the death of their conspecifics.
In about a quarter of the animals, the change in behavior lasted longer than half a year.
Around 13 percent of the dog owners had not observed any changes in behavior.
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The type of relationships between the dogs also has an influence on the forms of behavioral changes the dogs show, for example whether they were more parental or more friendly.
However, the amount of time the animals spent together had no significant effect.
It was also irrelevant whether the dogs had seen their friend's body or not.
It cannot be ruled out that Italian dog owners projected their own grief over the loss of their pet onto the other dogs.
But the results showed no dependency on the level of attachment between owners and their dogs or whether they humanized their pets.
»Dogs can be very distressed when one of them dies«
Nevertheless, human emotions could also play a role: the cases in which the keepers reported experiencing greater distress, anger and psychological trauma in reaction to death could be explained by increased levels of fear and reduced food intake relate to the surviving dogs.
"This means there may have been some form of emotional contagion or social transmission of fear that is common in social species as part of an adaptive coping strategy for potentially dangerous circumstances," said Federica Pirrone of the University of Milan, one of the authors of the Study.
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The researchers emphasized that it is not clear whether the results can actually be described as mourning.
However, they may indicate an overlooked welfare issue.
“Dogs are highly emotional animals that form very close bonds with members of their familiar group.
This means that if one of them dies, they can be very distressed and efforts should be made to help them cope with that despair,” Pirrone said.
It is well known that man is not the only being capable of an expression of some kind of grief: apes, dolphins, elephants and birds are among the species observed to participate in rituals surrounding death and seem to mourn.
The question of whether the dogs in the study only reacted to the loss of an animal or really to its death itself cannot be answered by the study.
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