Do Cats Feel Grief?

Cats, in many ways, have a bad reputation when it comes to their emotional range. Besides positive emotions, like the joy of lazing about in the sun, it is often not easy to spot many other emotions in our feline companions, other than, perhaps, indignation and hurt pride.

The usual contrast is with dogs, of course, with their emotional range of loyalty, disappointment, jealousy, and, yes, grief. But in tune with a flurry of other studies that force us to reevaluate the complexity of cat cognition and especially feline emotions, it seems that cats have a significantly more complex emotional life than they let on.

New Study of Cats and Grieving

According to a new study, cats seem to show signs of grief after the passing of another pet in the household. Even more surprisingly, this other pet doesn't need to be another cat; it may even be a dog. Apparently, we've been seriously underestimating the emotional range of cats.

It's been known for a while that some animals (especially those who live in closely knit social groups, like apes or dolphins) do display behavior after the death of a conspecific other that could justifiably be compared to grief. Chimpanzees, for example, often guard the body of the deceased. Dogs also seem to display very specific behavior after the death of another dog in the household: They spend less time sleeping, eating, and playing and more time alone or seeking the attention of their caregiver.

This is exactly the behavioral pattern observed in cats after the loss of another pet in the household: They spend significantly less time playing, eating, and sleeping and more time hiding or else with some form of attention-seeking behavior. The sample size of the study was quite large: 412 house cats were considered, and there was a very straight correlation between the strength of the "grieving" behavior—that is, the avoidance of play and sleep and the attention-seeking behavior—and the closeness of the surviving cat and the deceased pet.

The Influence of Human Caregivers' Grief

Nonetheless, there is still some unclarity about just what conclusion we can draw from these observations. The authors of this study acknowledge that the "grieving" behavior is also correlated with the emotional involvement of the human caregiver, which indicates that there may be a fair amount of anthropomorphizing involved.

Another possible explanation is that the cats' behavior didn't change as a result of the loss of the other pet but as a result of the grief of the human caregiver. This would explain the correlation between the "grieving" behavior and the strength of the emotional involvement of the human caregiver. And given what we know about how attuned cats (and dogs) are to the emotions of their masters, this would be a plausible explanation.

Would this make the emotional range of cats any less impressive? Maybe they do not feel grief at the death of a conspecific. But if cats, instead, react to the grief of their caregivers, this would be in some ways an even more complex, and more human-like, emotional response.